SEND Provision

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am grateful to colleagues on the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for supporting my application for the debate and giving it the prominent position that it has today. I thank all those who supported the application. I note that it is an unusual subject that brings together the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis), and the hon. Members for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Not all of them can be here today, but I know that each has passionately supported the case for more and better targeted investment to support children with special needs. I warmly welcome the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Gen Kitchen) to the Chamber. It is greatly to her credit that she has chosen to make her maiden speech on this subject; I look forward to hearing it.

There have been many debates on the importance of special educational needs and disabilities in the House over the past few years, so this is not new ground, and I make no apology for that. There have been Green Papers, a Command Paper, and the excellent Backbench Business debate under the auspices of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, which was so well subscribed. It is no surprise to me that today’s debate is similarly well supported across the Chamber. I do not intend to repeat all the arguments from the previous debate, in which 30 Members spoke. I hope that the Minister will take them all as read in his response.

In my casework as MP for Worcester, and in the evidence that I have seen as Chair of the Education Committee, there is a consistent trend of schools at every phase and of every variety struggling to meet the rising level of SEND, of families struggling to get the needs of their children properly met and supported, and of children with SEN too often being home educated, not as a result of genuine elective home education but as a result of their parents feeling that there is no other way in which their needs can be supported. We have heard this at the Education Committee described as “non-elective home education”.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The hon. Member has secured a really important debate. One big problem that comes across strongly in Derbyshire is the lack of capacity within the local authority to do the assessment. Many schools are supporting parents and their special needs children, but are unable to get assessment for months or even years. How big an issue does he think that local authority resources are in all this?

[Mr Walker]

The hon. Gentleman is right: that is definitely part of the challenge. I will try to come back to that later in my speech. The briefing that the Local Government Association has provided for the debate is very helpful in drawing attention to that. In the previous Backbench Business debate, Members from both sides of the House highlighted the need for earlier identification of need, and all the different organisations across local authorities, health and education that need resource and support to deliver that.

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

The need for early identification is incredibly strong. There has been some progress towards it, and I congratulate the Minister for the strides that he has been able to make, but we cannot have a genuinely universal education system unless we have universal early identification of special needs, so will my hon. Friend welcome the fact that I have secured the opportunity to reintroduce my Dyslexia Screening and Teacher Training Bill, as a ten-minute rule Bill, on 23 April?

[Mr Walker]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing that opportunity, and for all the progress that he has made in drawing attention to the needs of dyslexic children and identifying those needs early. He is right that we need to look at how we better support universal identification of need at an earlier stage. He will recognise that some conditions only show themselves over time, so it is important that there are the right interventions at every level to identify those needs and ensure they are properly met.

When we debate children missing school, as we often have in recent years, we often find it difficult to tell which are doing so because of unmet need. The work of the Children’s Commissioner, among many others, has highlighted that that is a major cause. When we debate rising levels of home education without the benefit of a much-needed statutory register, which the Government have now pledged to support, we find it impossible to tell how many of the rising number of cases are genuinely elective. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) is sponsor of a Bill that seeks to address the issue, and I hope the whole House will support its Second Reading tomorrow. I welcome the fact that Opposition Front Benchers have already done so and I believe that the Government have as well.

Both those factors, as highlighted in the Education Committee’s report on persistent absence, point to the need for urgent action on SEND. The Government’s own Command Paper is also clear on that point. In fact, in preparing for this debate, I was struck by recent comments made by the Secretary of State at the Association of School and College Leaders conference:

“The massive demand, of more and more children diagnosed or even not diagnosed but have special educational needs, that’s something that I don’t think we’ve got the right system in place. If you look at special education needs, we haven’t built enough special educational needs places or schools. We have councils under pressure because families can’t get the right support that they need”—

a succinct summary of the nature of the challenge, which colleagues across the House will recognise all too well.

In that context, we need to consider the departmental estimates of the Department for Education, the £57.8 billion rising to £58.5 billion for the core schools budget, and the £82 billion rising to more than £100 billion overall in the supplementary estimate, as well as the £6.3 billion capital budget. Although it would be easy for a Government Member to point to those big numbers and trumpet what are without doubt record sums in cash terms for revenue funding, they do not tell the whole story.

The excellent House of Commons Library briefing prepared for this debate confirms both cash and real-terms growth in spending on high needs since 2015, as well as a faster trajectory of increasing need as identified by education, health and care plans. Within those numbers, it is to the credit of Ministers in this Government that the amount spent on high-needs funding has doubled in the past 10 years and has increased by more than 60% since 2019. That shows some recognition of the importance of investing in this space.

But it is also clear, as we debated on the F40—Campaign for Fairer Funding in Education—motion a few weeks ago, that revenue funding has not been sufficient to meet demand. Over the same period, the growth of EHCPs alone has more than doubled. The level of need demonstrated not only by the number rising from 240,000 nine years ago to more than 500,000 today, but by the complexity of conditions and the demand for specialist places to support highly complex pupils, has grown even faster. I am told that 180 children per day are being identified as having special educational needs.

For every child with an EHCP, as the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) pointed out, many more are awaiting assessment or have their needs already met in public or independent schools without the need for an EHCP. Nevertheless, those children also need support. I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments for the early identification of support need, but that is a vital part of the argument.

Also to the credit of Ministers is the greater recognition in recent years of the need for more capital investment in SEND places. Even in the most recent Budget, the main capital commitment for school-age education was a further £105 million for 15 SEN free schools, delivering up to 2,000 specialist places across the country. I welcome that, but I observe that the calculation that just over £100 million can deliver 15 whole new special schools seems a challenging one. That gives a cost of £52,000 per place, compared with more than £86,666 per place in the calculations that the Government made only three years ago—before the impact of three years of high inflation for building costs.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for all he does on the Education Committee. In my constituency surgeries, I, like many Members of Parliament, see parents in real pain. They want the best for their child, and they are waiting for one to two years to get a plan so that their healthcare and education needs can be met. My hon. Friend asked about the allocation of the £105 million in the Budget. Can he clarify his understanding of how the Government will allocate that across the country? I need an allocation for my constituents in Gillingham and Rainham, who urgently need it. All Members want to know whether that will be done on a fair basis.

[Mr Walker]

I congratulate my hon. Friend for making the case for his constituents. The question he asks is one for those on the Front Bench, and I hope the Minister can further clarify the process of allocating those resources.

At the last spending review in 2021, the Department secured £2.6 billion over the review period for a mixture of new specialist settings, expansions of existing ones and delivery of bases in mainstream schools. In total, that was designed to deliver 30,000 new school places. Will the Minister, in his reply, update the House on progress on spending that substantial capital investment? Can he update the House, too, on the total number of specialist places already delivered? Will he explain how deliverable the Government have found this programme, at a cost of about £86,666 per place, and the rationale for the Budget announcement being so much cheaper?

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his exceptional work in this area. He shares my passion for the new Malvern-based autism free school, which will benefit children across Worcestershire and more widely. Can he update the House on how he sees progress on delivering the new free school?

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her intervention and for her campaigning to secure those vitally needed places in south Worcestershire, which I hope will benefit my constituents as well as hers. I want to more places delivered for autistic students in Worcestershire as swiftly as possible. That is being done through a combination of the provision that she has rightly championed and campaigned for, a new base in my constituency in a mainstream school—which the county council is commissioning—and the provision recently created for an AP, or alternate provision, school in the north of the county. There is some welcome progress there, but as I will touch on later, I do not feel that it is quite enough to meet need.

Back on that £2.6 billion, I have some concerns about the progress of that much needed capital investment. Careful examination of the supplementary estimates for the Department reveals a £300 million transfer from the capital to the revenue budget. I ask for reassurance that none of that has come out of the £2.6 billion originally targeted for investment in SEND. If any has, will the Minister tell us how much? Can he provide figures for how many places have been commissioned in each of the three categories set out in the 2021 spending review and how many more are in the pipeline?

From long experience and from my work on the Select Committee, I know that the DFE has routinely underspent its allocated capital, but at a time when the need for SEND placements is so high and we have the urgent challenge of RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete—affecting many mainstream and specialist schools, I hope that the Department is protecting the precious investment that Ministers, including me and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), fought so hard to secure.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend securing this debate and for his work on the subject. In Cheadle, we are welcoming a new £70 million SEND provision being opened at the end of this year, in September; 133 places will be provided there. Teachers and headteachers I have talked to are telling me that in their establishments and schools, they want more resource-based provision, which might involve capital investment. Going along with that as well, we have the problems mentioned earlier in securing the education, health and care plan. Does my hon. Friend agree that all those issues need to be addressed if we are to get the right future for our children?

[Mr Walker]

Yes, is the short answer. My hon. Friend sums up some of the challenges neatly.

I come to some of the recommendations of the Select Committee before touching in a little more detail on the local picture in my part of the world. During my time as Chair and under my predecessor, now the Minister for Skills, the Education Committee has held a number of sessions on SEND and the implementation of the 2014 reforms. In 2019, before my time, the Committee concluded that the reforms of 2014 “were the right ones” in principle, but that implementation had “been badly hampered”, notably by administration and funding, which at that time it called “wholly inadequate”.

The Committee also called for a more rigorous framework for local authorities; a direct line of appeal for parents and schools to the Department for Education; powers for the local government and social care ombudsman to investigate school complaints; and development of more employment and training opportunities post 16 for people with SEND. The Government pointed to their Green Paper and towards the Command Paper that was finally published two years later in response, but only the first and last of those recommendations have been fully addressed.

More recently, under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend who is now the Minister for Skills, and his predecessor, the Committee held sessions and published correspondence in which SEND funding, and delays in processing it, have repeatedly been raised. I am grateful for correspondence in which Ministers have unequivocally confirmed that there is no push from the Government to ration or limit EHCP numbers, but I note that in his letter of October last year, the Minister on the Front Bench stated that

“in-year funding delays occur due to insufficient planning from local authorities”.

Will he update the House on what steps he is taking to address that and to ensure that every local authority has the resource and support it needs to plan properly in this space?

The vast majority of local authorities have high-needs deficits, which have been growing rather than shrinking in recent years. I have no doubt that my hon. Friend will talk about the valuable work that the Department supports through the safety valve and “Delivering Better Value” programmes, but the fact that those programmes are constantly growing, as is the cumulative deficit of local authorities, surely makes the case for more funding. At some stage, we have to acknowledge that producing ever more help to manage the level of deficits is not a sustainable solution, and that investment is required to clear or remove them. The high needs deficits are now compounded by the fact that the same local authorities have rapidly growing deficits in children’s social care and transport, limiting their potential to cross-subsidise.

The Government promised to introduce in their SEND and AP improvement plan a new national framework of banding and price tariffs for high needs funding, and more details were to follow later in 2023. I am not aware that that has been published, but my local specialist schools tell me that, although the total level of high needs funding has seen much-needed increases, and underlying per pupil funding has risen in real terms, the banding for specific conditions has not had an inflationary increase for over a decade. Given the rising costs of employing teaching assistants to support complex needs, surely that needs to be reviewed.

At every level of education, my Committee has made recommendations about SEND and encouraged the Department to do more to support SEND children and our families. In our childcare report, we recommended that the Government amend the early years foundation stage framework to ensure that more staff involved in a child’s care receive mandatory training in identifying and manging types of SEND. The Government rejected that proposal but stated that newly revised criteria for level 3 early years educator qualifications, alongside level 2 criteria, now include standalone criteria on SEND identification and practice. They also made welcome announcements about support for early years special educational needs co-ordinators, and partially accepted our recommendation to expand family hubs—although, to be clear, I believe that they can and should go further.

Absence rates are significantly higher for pupils with SEND. In our report on persistent absence, the Committee recommended that the Government prioritise resources for early identification of need, inclusion and assessment in mainstream schools to ensure that they can adequately support pupils with SEND. We recommended making attendance in specialist schools a key metric of success, recognising both the support that having children in such settings provides families and the developmental benefits to the child. The Committee also recommended that the Government ensure that pupils with SEND are placed in alternative provision only for a limited time and as a way of addressing issues affecting their attendance in mainstream schools. The DFE should discourage its use as a way of managing behaviour.

The Department for Education said in its response that it is working with 32 local authorities and testing approaches in schools to improving early identification of SEND-related conditions. Additionally, it is piloting early language support for every child, jointly funded by NHS England, to have speech and language professionals based in early years primary schools to spot early delays in development and take swift appropriate action. Pilots are great, but we need that support everywhere in the country.

For our recent report on Ofsted’s work with schools, we heard that lack of expertise among inspectors was seen by specialist schools as a particular problem. The report recommended that Ofsted ensure that the lead inspector always has expertise relevant to the type of school, and that a majority of members of larger teams have the relevant expertise. We recommended that factors, such as the number of students from disadvantaged groups and those with SEND, should be clearly described and visible in the final Ofsted report. We hope that that will be reiterated both to the new chief inspector, through his “Big Listen” consultation, which was launched last week, and to the Government.

Evidence to our careers inquiry suggested that pupils with SEND were not receiving adequate careers advice and guidance, and highlighted that they face additional barriers and need extra support to access the same level of careers education and opportunities as their peers. The Committee recommended that the Department set out the steps that it intends to take to ensure that all SENCOs are fully trained and working with career leaders or with a school or college.

The Committee has welcomed the increased focus on supported internships and apprenticeships targeted at SEND pupils, but as we highlighted in our post-16 qualifications report, too many SEND pupils are being held back by the focus on GCSE grade 4 for English and maths as a gateway to progression. We have also agreed in principle to look into the Government’s changes to disabled students’ allowance to ensure that the consolidation of that system does not lead to a reduction in opportunities for SEND students to progress into and sustain higher education. That matters because we know that pupils with special educational needs are a rising proportion of the school population. Their life chances matter just as much a everyone else’s, and their parents’ ability to work, support them and live a full life depends on their receiving the right support through childhood, in school and into early adulthood.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

This is not just the morally right and good thing to do for the individuals in question and their families, but it is massively good for wider society because it unlocks the potential of neurodivergent individuals, who are among the most creative and gifted people in the country. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend puts it perfectly, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

The logic behind the Government’s welcome increase in investment in childcare, which I have strongly supported, applies just as much, if not more, when it comes to supporting children with SEND. If we get this right, there are benefits for the life chances of the individual and of the family who support them.

[Mr Perkins]

rose—

[Mr Walker]

I will not give way because I need to make progress.

I have lost count of the number of highly educated parents who have felt that they needed to give up work to support their children. An increase in the departmental estimate to support SEND children would repay itself in the future earnings of their parents and would help the Government to meet their worthy aspiration of halving the disability employment gap and ensuring that work pays for future generations.

I should acknowledge some welcome local progress. In Worcestershire, two new specialist settings for children with autism have opened in the past few years: the one mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), and one in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier). The county council is in the process of commissioning a new secondary school with a specialist autism base in Worcester. We have seen expansions in the number of pupils supported at both Regency High School and Fort Royal Community Primary School in Worcester, and we have seen improvements in the opening of new settings in alternative provision. An exciting partnership between Heart of Worcestershire College and the National Star college in Cheltenham promises better local progression opportunities for further education students with SEND. Our university prides itself on being one of the most inclusive in the country.

The demand on all our settings is rising insatiably. Fort Royal in particular has seen a huge increase in severity among the population of pupils it serves. That has led the school to seek agreement with the county council to reduce its intake so that it can ensure that pupils with highly complex needs are properly and safely supported. The principal of the school has recently written to local politicians to highlight that and the risk of local needs not being met by 2030. Will the Minister look at that correspondence and consider carefully the need for small specialist provision in Worcestershire, particularly at primary level? I have over many years made the case to move Fort Royal Community Primary School—a brilliant school on a highly constrained site—to a location where it could grow and expand.

I also want to raise the concerns of respite settings such as New Hope Worcester, which provides vital support to SEND families during the holiday. New Hope has seen a reduction in the number of places that it is commissioned to provide. Parents from that setting have raised with me their concern that more support is urgently needed for respite care, which helps to ensure that their children can engage in specialist education and avoids the far greater cost of children being taken into homes. Although that support comes from the budget of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities rather than the DFE, we need to acknowledge the importance of cross-departmental working to better support need.

The Local Government Association’s helpful briefing for this debate, which I have touched on already, majors on that issue and makes a number of constructive recommendations. It calls for a cross-Government strategy for children and young people, arguing that DLUHC should co-ordinate capacity issues impacting on children’s social care, SEND and the early years. The LGA wants councils to have the powers to lead local SEND systems, and hold health and education partners to account for their work supporting SEND children and young people.

The LGA calls on the Government to use the SEND improvement plan to recognise the vital interconnection between SEN and mental health. Children and young people with learning difficulties are over four times more likely than average to develop a mental health problem. That means that one in seven of all children and young people with mental health difficulties in the UK will also have a learning disability. The report points out that good-quality early years provision can generate sustained and significant improvements in children’s outcomes, reducing disparities in later life, but neither councils nor early years providers feel that they have sufficient funding, resources and tools to properly support children with SEND and their families.

This morning, I attended the excellent briefing by the Children’s Services Development Group on the launch of its “Hopeful Horizons” report. Among the key recommendations of that report are urgent clarity on the banding and tariffs arising from the new national standards, and speeding up the building and registration of new services. The group pointed out that independent specialist advisers have a wealth of knowledge and want to work closely with the Government to make the process a success.

It is good to see the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) in her place. I look forward to hearing her proposals for ensuring that any future Labour Government address SEND funding and provision better than they have in the past. I expect her to point to her party’s flagship policy of imposing VAT on independent schools as part of the solution for providing the resource to meet needs. However, having heard many of the uses to which Labour wants to put that theoretical money, I am at a loss to see how any of it would provide the revenue or capital needed to better support SEND children.

In fact, in our last debate on this issue, in which no Labour Back Benchers spoke, we heard from the hon. Lady’s colleague that Labour does not plan to exempt specialist settings from its tax grab—only pupils in independent settings with an EHCP. I profoundly believe that that is a policy mistake that Labour would come to regret if it ever carried it out. Many pupils with SEND are supported either by their families or by local authorities in independent provision, including many highly specialised schools, and a small proportion of those pupils currently have EHCPs.

The decision to make that, and solely that, the gateway for avoiding a 20% increase in costs would create enormous and immediate demand for EHCPs, which local authorities and health structures are already struggling to provide in a timely manner. It could result in many pupils with SEND leaving, or being taken out of, settings that are currently meeting their needs and then seeking EHCPs in order to access settings that might. I do not believe that Labour has thought this policy through, or that it has factored into its calculations that £86,000 per place for public provision.

The DFE estimates show rising spend on public education and schools and, within that, a rising level of investment in high needs. All of that is welcome, but not sufficient. In 2014, this House legislated to better support the needs of SEND children, and as the Government themselves have acknowledged, the potential of that legislation has not yet been realised. I hope Front Benchers of whatever colour will reflect on the need for future estimates to better support this vital and worthy cause.

In conclusion, I will support the departmental estimates, because they provide record levels of funding for education in general and SEND in particular, but I believe there is a strong case for increasing both capital and revenue investment in the latter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock]

That is absolutely right, and this issue unites colleagues from across the House. The Bill I will bring forward next month has cross-party support, and I urge the hon. Member to add her name to it. It has support from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) all the way through to the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), and it is not often that they sign the same piece of paper. If she will add her name to it, that would create a triangle of support across this House, which I would really welcome.

As the hon. Member said—in fact, she anticipated my very next point—the Ministry of Justice reports that 42% of incarcerated individuals had experienced exclusion from school, and we know that just over half of those in the male prison population have a primary school reading age. Addressing neurodiversity, identifying it early, ensuring there is the right support, and therefore reducing illiteracy and getting in support for the behavioural consequences of neurodivergent conditions will lead to fewer people in prison. It will also make sure that those who end up in prison, having been missed by the education system, get this support, and that will help to reduce reoffending. I am glad to say that the Lord Chancellor is on this and is making progress, and the Health Secretary made a huge amount of progress when she was prisons Minister, but there is much more to do.

Here is one concrete example of a new policy that I would propose, which I put to the Minister. The Ministry of Justice is currently rolling out digital profiles of prisoners, outlining their screening data and educational enrolments that are assessed on entry to prison, and ensuring that that data follows prisoners as they move from prison to prison. It is a very good initiative that was started under the previous Lord Chancellor and is being rolled out now. However, in the school system there is no automated data flow from primary to secondary school. Often, there are assessments early in secondary school, and that is good, but if there is screening data or an assessment of individual child need, there is no automated way for such data, with the richness of the data that can now be available, to be passed through to secondary school. Essentially, each child starts from a blank canvas, and it all has to be reassessed.

We need an accurate assessment of where a child is up to at the start of secondary school, but understanding their history as well would be valuable, so I ask the Minister to look at what the MOJ has done on data transfer—in its case, normally from initial prison to the longer-stay prison—for use in the transition from primary to secondary school.

[Mr Robin Walker]

It strikes me that my right hon. Friend’s suggestion about passporting information from primary has much wider applications. Something I have often observed in my work on the Education Committee is that there are problems when, for instance, primary schools build up a pupil’s ability in one language and then the pupil transfers to a secondary school that teaches a completely different one. Some form of passporting of data from primary to secondary through a pupil passport, not only for special educational needs but for learning, would be extremely useful in managing such transitions.

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, I am absolutely certain that this approach to data is more widely applicable. My focus is on this specific area, but there is now a richness of data on individual children that simply was not available 10 years ago or even five years ago, and I think that such passporting of data would be invaluable.

I agree with everything the Chair of the Select Committee said on the question of funding, so I will not repeat it. He has been the leader of the f40 campaign for many years. Suffolk is underfunded, as is Worcestershire, so I put in my plug, but I do not need to add any more details. The Minister knows them for sure.

I will close by saying that I appreciate the engagement the Minister has shown on this subject, and I look forward to meeting him in private in the next couple of weeks to continue this discussion. However, I would urge him to support early identification not just as a matter of social justice, not just as a matter of progress for each individual child and not just to ensure that each child can reach their potential, but, since this is an estimates day debate, because we will then spend taxpayers’ money on education more wisely and we will get better educational outcomes as a result.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robin Walker]

We have had an excellent debate. We have heard from Members in all parts of the House about the importance of continuing to increase investment in special educational needs across both capital and revenue.

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Gen Kitchen) on a fantastic maiden speech. I was very impressed to hear about her ancestor who was a chaplain in the great war. We had a famous one in Worcester, Woodbine Willie, who went on to become a great Christian socialist. I am sure that the hon. Lady will make a big contribution on education issues, and I invite her to join us on the Education Committee, where I hope she will be able to contribute further.

We have heard brilliant speeches from Members on both sides of the House, and although I do not have enough time to talk about all of them, I congratulate them on the case that they have made for their constituents. I recognise that the Minister has done some very important work and that and he takes the issue seriously. I say to him, “Keep it up, and help us to help you make the case to the Treasury to ensure that these estimates continue to increase.”

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).

World Book Day

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

That is absolutely fantastic news. It is a testament to the work that has been done and to the focus we have had in this country on reading over the last 14 years, and we have to continue to build on that. My hon. Friend mentioned Tolkien; it is not necessarily widely known, but the Shire in “The Lord of the Rings” was based on the Kinver Edge rock houses in my constituency, and I strongly encourage people to come and visit them—[Interruption.] I notice that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is going to intervene and disagree with me on that.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I am delighted to intervene on that point. I congratulate my right hon. Friend for the points he is making, but Worcestershire would certainly dispute the suggestion that the Shire was based on Staffordshire. Tolkien enjoyed looking down from the Malvern hills and comparing the black Black Country, which may have been the inspiration for Mordor, with the green shire below him.

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

I fear that the point is not going to be resolved in this debate, but it is fair to say that I am right and my hon. Friend is wrong. I will, however, move swiftly on.

The Department for Education plays an incredibly important role in the promotion of World Book Day, working with the Publishers Association and schools and creating the underpinning to ensure that we get our children reading. We have seen children make amazing progress up the PISA scales in terms of reading outcomes and understanding literature as part of our curriculum. That is also true of phonics, which I know is close to the heart of my right hon. Friend the Minister, who has championed it over the years, along with many of us. We know that phonics delivers results, and we are seeing that in the international tables. Sadly, we are not necessarily seeing the same results in every component part of the United Kingdom, and I urge those parts that have not embraced phonics as a central part of developing, promoting and teaching reading to look at it as a matter of urgency.

I particularly welcome the DFE’s £60 million English hubs programme—an intervention focusing on designing and developing the expertise to teach reading. Getting that right is critical, and a number of us in the Chamber have probably seen that work. Getting the very best teaching, as well as encouraging, developing and, most importantly, sharing it right across our schools, is critical for all our children.

Libraries have already been touched on, and it is so important that children from right across the country always have access to a good library and the opportunity to pick up a good book and to be transported to a different world and a different country—or even Worcestershire. With the support of that book, they can go anywhere their imagination takes them. The £20 million libraries improvement fund is certainly welcome, but I suggest that we need to do more in that area. There are some concerns; we saw library book stocks decrease by 11% across England, Wales and Scotland between 2021 and 2022. We need the best possible range of stock in our libraries so that when youngsters have that book that they picked up on World Book Day, they have the opportunity to feed and develop their enthusiasm.

It is important that we thank all the people who have been instrumental in creating the structure for World Book Day. We must also thank all the teachers, teaching assistants, support staff and parents, and the children themselves, who make World Book Day the living, wonderful, beautiful thing it is.

SEND Provision and Funding

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this hugely important debate. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for providing time, and to the Petitions Committee for organising and managing many of the important petitions to which it relates, some of which I hope to address.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) on championing this vital campaign. Having worked alongside him on one or two challenging issues over the years, I now have the pleasure of doing so again. I support his motion for three key reasons. As we have heard, Members across the House have huge case loads relating to special educational needs. As Chairman of the Education Committee, and as a long-standing and committed supporter of f40 and its campaign for fairer funding, I think that getting the right support to children with special educational needs and disabilities is a vital challenge, and we have to be frank that it is a challenge with which successive Governments have struggled.

The Committee praised the aims of the 2014 reforms, but it concluded in 2019 that their implementation had not been effective and that funding was “wholly inadequate”. It is to the Government’s great credit that high needs funding has since increased substantially, more than doubling since 2015 and increasing by 60% since the start of this Parliament.

There has been a real focus on providing more specialist places but, while it is undoubtedly true that this Government have prioritised the needs of SEN children in spending reviews, it is also true that the real and substantial increases have not been enough to meet demand. The vast majority of local authorities are facing high needs deficits. Worcestershire is by no means among the worst, but it has told me that it expects its deficit to rise from £34.5 million at the end of March 2024 to £44 million next year.

Not only are specialist and mainstream settings in every constituency struggling to meet the demands of the parents and families that they do accommodate but, as my right hon. Friend made clear in his granddaughter’s case, too many children are not in those settings when they ought to be. The Education Committee has heard that non-elective home education is too prevalent in this space. It is therefore right that we use this debate to press for more resource for what is, legally and morally, a meeting of basic need and the fundamental right to education.

I pay tribute, as others have, to the incredible work happening in every single school in my constituency to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. I say every single school, because it is clear that SEN children and children with EHCPs are spread across the entire school estate—mainstream as well as specialist. I hear from teachers and leaders in mainstream primary schools, early years settings, secondaries, sixth forms and colleges, and, almost without exception, they speak about observing rising levels of need and complexity of need.

That is even more acute in specialist settings, which some years ago were dealing with a few highly complex cases of children with multiple and severe conditions, alongside larger numbers of children with a single diagnosis. Today, an increasing proportion of their intake is taken up by those with multiple and severe conditions, and both Regency High School and Fort Royal Community Primary School in my constituency have described the pressures that creates.

We should all be supporting the incredible parents and carers who support SEN children, while recognising, as the Government’s Green Paper and White Paper have, that the current system has been a source of frustration and confrontation for them. We should be supporting the aspirations of the Green Paper and the White Paper to deliver the right support in the right place at the right time, but to do so will require the scale of resource and investment in training, infrastructure and needs-based funding for which this debate is calling.

There are brilliant people providing support to SEND children across the country, but the rising tide of demand for specialist support needs to be acknowledged from the start. That is why the case for more funding, as well as fairer funding, is really important. Ahead of this debate, f40 prepared a detailed and instructive briefing setting out that the areas that have among the lowest overall school funding also have among the lowest extra funding for high needs. For the record, Worcestershire has the 30th lowest overall funding and the 32nd lowest high needs funding. That position has improved since 2010, but it still puts our school pupils, and particularly our special needs pupils, at a huge disadvantage compared with those with exactly the same needs in better funded areas.

I know that the Department for Education drafted legislation to take the next step in delivering on our manifesto promise of a fairer funding formula by making dedicated schools grant payments directly to schools, rather than through local authorities, but that the legislation fell victim to the demise of the late Schools Bill. I ask the Minister for an update on when the Department plans to take that crucial next step.

Today, f40 is calling not for reallocation but for growing the size of the pie, and for doing so with urgency. That call has been backed by the National Education Union, the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, the Early Years Alliance and the National Governance Association, which all agree that the high needs block requires an extra £4.6 billion a year just to prevent the current crisis in high needs from getting worse. That has been estimated through the growth in the number of EHCPs since 2015.

The substantial revenue funding ask in today’s motion is only part of the solution. We also need to reduce lengthy journeys, which have placed huge strains on home-to-school transport budgets but do nothing for the welfare of children. My local authority, like many others, is seeing huge increases in its home-to-school transport budget. That is contributing to another growing deficit, putting more pressure on local families and other services. Although I appreciate that the Department for Education is not the funder for those budgets, joint working with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure that they are properly funded and effectively used is vital.

We need to ensure that the worthy aspiration set out in the last spending review settlement—the £2.6 billion to provide new places—is not just dealt with as a one-off; it needs to be continued in future spending reviews. With that in mind, I am very grateful for the investment that has gone into a new all-through specialist autism school in the neighbouring constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). However, I know that my primary special school, Fort Royal, and my secondary special school, Regency, are desperately in need of expansion. We need to see that capital continue to come and we desperately need a new specialist assessment centre for the early years in Worcester.

Spending to save in this area is very important, and the Government have rightly set out to halve the disability employment gap. My Committee’s inquiry on careers education highlighted how SEN children could benefit from more support in advice and guidance on their careers. I very much agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden said about the importance of speech and language therapy and investment in that area. I supported the calls for SEND in the specialists campaign last year, and I am glad that the Government have responded positively to a number of those, but we also need to look at auditory verbal therapy, teachers of the deaf, and the number of child psychologists and paediatricians in our health and care teams. Some areas that go beyond the education budget need to be looked at in this respect.

I briefly wish to touch on some of the petitions in support of this motion that related to training for SEN. They are very important, and I welcome the fact that the Government have made some moves to include more SEN content in the initial teacher training curriculum. I urge them also to look at the early career framework in that respect, and that echoes some of the calls that my Select Committee has made. Petition 591092 called for greater qualifications for SENCOs and for us to set a higher bar for their expertise and training. My Committee has welcomed the Government’s commitment to national professional qualifications for SENCOs and heard some positive information on the number of people taking the level 3 qualification. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston), who is on the Front Bench today, wrote to us in October to say:

“We have increased funding for an additional 2,000 SENCOs to be trained, taking the total up to 7,000… The project is on track to train a minimum of 3,000 SENCOs by August 2024.”

Can he confirm that that trajectory is being maintained?

This is a hugely challenging and important area. It would not only ease a large and growing financial burden affecting every local authority up and down the country, but particularly benefit children with SEND and their families if the aspirations set out in this motion could be delivered. I therefore commend it to the whole House.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Support for Kinship Carers

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson]

Absolutely, and I am grateful for that intervention, because the right hon. Member makes a case that I have made throughout, whenever I have talked about kinship carers: the Government cannot afford not to provide this support. The analysis shows that if we paid kinship carers a similar allowance to foster carers, for every child that we prevent from going into care, the Government would save £35,000 a year. It is a no-brainer because of both the short-term savings to the Treasury and the long-term savings, in terms of the more positive outcomes that we achieve for those children.

So what opportunity stands before us with the national kinship care strategy? It provides a key opportunity for the Government to deliver financial and educational support to children in kinship care that will be truly transformative. Kinship carers cannot wait for another spending review or a different colour of Government.

My Kinship Care Bill, introduced last year, had four main asks, and I hope that the strategy will make significant progress towards implementing each one. First, all kinship carers should have a weekly allowance at the same level as the national minimum fostering allowance. Many experience severe financial hardship. Kinship’s survey last year found that two in five kinship carers had avoided putting the heating on, one in five skipped meals and more than one in eight used food banks. A national, non-means-tested allowance would end the system of patchy, means-tested allowances that reflect a postcode lottery in the support that councils can afford to provide.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I apologise for missing the beginning of the hon. Lady’s speech, but I know that she has campaigned very effectively on this issue. Does she not agree, though, that the particular challenge with means testing in this space is that so many kinship carers are grandparents? They are retired and they have savings, but they need those savings for themselves and their retirement. It is vital that we have a system of support that recognises that particular challenge.

[Munira Wilson]

Absolutely, and that is why we need a consistent system applied across the board that is not dependent on the political persuasion of a local authority or what means it has to support kinship carers. I have come across many grandparents who are using up their life savings and people who might be about to retire and are having to quit the workforce sooner than they wanted. Kinship carers come in so many different shapes and sizes. That is why a proper means-tested allowance and national rules governing that is so important. The critical thing is that money should not be a barrier to a family or a friend taking in a child who is part of the wider family, because such barriers can lead to a child being forced into local authority care.

Secondly, kinship carers should be entitled to paid employment leave on a par with adoptive parents. Kinship’s “Forced Out” survey found that four in 10 kinship carers had to leave work permanently and a further 45% reduced their hours after becoming a kinship carer. Those carers are disproportionately women and are over-represented in healthcare, education and social care, which simply exacerbates our workforce crisis in public services.

Thirdly, the Bill proposes extending greater educational support to children in kinship care such as pupil premium plus, virtual school heads and a higher priority in school admissions.

Fourthly, there should be a definition of kinship care in statute that will help carers and councils to better understand who a kinship carer is and what support they are entitled to.

The Government’s response so far on the first of the three core asks has been disappointing, and “Stable Homes, Built on Love” has provided little hope. The Government have simply said they will “explore the case” for a mandatory financial allowance for kinship carers who possess a legal order. I am intrigued to understand more from the Minister about what “explore the case” means. Perhaps he will shed some light on it today. Will we see a cost-benefit analysis and an impact assessment? Are civil servants working actively on the issue, or are we talking about a couple of emails and phone calls?

I am pleased that the Government have adopted wholesale the definition of kinship care that was proposed by the Family Rights Group and have put it out for consultation—it was the same definition that I used in my Bill. However, the definition will have clout only if it is put into legislation and has statutory rights or entitlements attached to it. Simply putting it into guidance will likely not resolve the poor recognition and understanding of the term.

We cannot have another strategy that ducks the big decisions and kicks them into the long grass. Even if the plan has no spending commitments, which would be an absolute disaster, there are some steps that the Government could take to significantly improve the lives of kinship carers.

On data, our ability to make the case for greater investment in kinship care is greatly hampered by confusion over how many children live in kinship care and where kinship carers work. The latest estimate that 152,000 children in England live in kinship care comes from a University of Bristol analysis of the 2011 census.

In April, I wrote to the UK Statistics Authority to ask whether the Office for National Statistics intended to publish figures from the 2021 census. It replied that the Department for Education formally requested data on kinship carers earlier that month and that it would provide an update on that later in the year. I understand that that data might be published later this month. Will the Minister confirm that? Will it include information on the demographic make-up of kinship carers and their labour market patterns?

Meanwhile, parliamentary questions that I tabled reveal that, although the Ministry of Justice publishes how many special guardianship orders and child arrangement orders are granted each year, it does not know how many children are currently subject to one. What more will the Minister do to ensure that his Department, the Ministry of Justice, and local authorities have accurate information on the number of children in kinship care?

On therapeutic care, I know how important the adoption support fund was to my constituent, Kim, who used it for her granddaughter’s attachment therapy. However, Kim was in the uncommon position that her granddaughter was previously looked after before she went into kinship care. That meant she was entitled to ASF and also to pupil premium plus. As I told the House during my debate in October, that creates a totally perverse incentive for families to allow children to go into care so that they can receive additional support. Will the Minister review the eligibility criteria for the schemes so that more children in kinship care can qualify? Could the name of the adoption support fund be changed to acknowledge that kinship carers can also apply?

On legal aid, the Department has committed to

“work across government to explore…options for an extension of legal aid with kinship carers with SGOs and CAOs.”

Again, I would be grateful if the Minister explained what “explore” means as we seek to plug the gaps in legal aid provisions, particularly when children’s services first reach out to prospective kinship carers.

The Government must remember that one in three kinship carer households is non-white. Ethnic minority children in kinship care are less likely to have a legal order. I recognise that a legal order may signify that the caring arrangement will be stable and permanent. However, if the Government restrict all their support to children in formal kinship arrangements, they risk widening ethnic disparities. Will the Minister confirm that the strategy will be accompanied by an equalities impact assessment, so that the risk can be mitigated?

This debate comes in the context of increasing anxiety about the financial stability of many local authorities across England. As we have seen in the press lately, some are in a catastrophic position with their finances. The strategy must not impose on local authorities various well-intentioned duties, pilots and instructions to change their culture without giving them the resources to implement them effectively.

I will end with a reminder of why we are all here and of the families whose lives we are trying to improve. Kim was one of the first kinship carers in my constituency to contact me. She is the special guardian of her granddaughter. She says of her experience:

“We are fortunate to have an understanding of the system now and can advocate for our granddaughter. However, the emotional, financial and physical price has taken its toll! Even 5 years into our Special Guardianship Order and with the help that we have been able to access, my granddaughter really struggles with any change…On a personal level, we have had to give up our roles as grandparents and become her parents. We have done so gladly but there are moments when we do grieve for those lost roles that we will never get back.”

April, which is not her real name, spoke to me about caring for her nephew after his mother passed away. She says:

“Little did I know that [by] giving my sister peace of mind as she faced leaving her small children, and [by] giving my nephew the security and care he desperately needed, I was unwittingly stepping into a ‘private arrangement’ with zero support.

We want to focus on the positives. It is a positive [that] we’ve got a new family member. But if we have to worry about financial things or [other] support…We don’t want to have to do that. I want to give him the very best childhood.”

Many of the kinship carers who are watching the debate from the Gallery will have similar testimonies. Indeed, last year I hosted an event in Parliament for kinship carers and heard many moving stories. I also met kinship carers in Sutton a few months ago. Although every story and every family is unique, the themes I have set out today, including the barriers and challenges kinship carers face in the system, are often a common thread. People are so exhausted from fighting against them.

I invite right hon. and hon. Members to come to tea in the café after the debate with me and the kinship carers here today to hear at first hand about their experiences. They and I now look to the Minister to make sure that the upcoming kinship care strategy will be truly transformational. By stepping up for kinship carers, we support every child to get the very best start in life, no matter what their background.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing the debate and bringing to the attention of the House all the costs of being a kinship carer, as well as illuminating the tremendous value they represent and the real difference they make to the children they bring into their immediate family and circle. I also congratulate her on her speech. I join her in paying tribute to the new Minister, who has a strong background that touches on all the issues we may consider today, most notably performance in school, outcomes and achievement. He will also be looking to ensure that the children in our care have every opportunity to thrive.

I pay tribute to the Government for bringing forward the kinship care strategy, with the tremendous potential therein to bring the sector into a much more sustainable and fair place. They have acknowledged that historically the sector has not had the focus and recognition it deserves, merits and needs, so I really welcome the sea change that we all hope to see. I praise East Sussex County Council for the work it does in this space—indeed, its support was recognised by the kinship carers I met most recently—and I pay tribute to the council’s team as they endeavour to meet the challenges and support kinship carers across East Sussex, and Eastbourne in particular.

The hon. Lady is right to recognise that across the House there is not just increasing recognition of this kinship care but an earnest desire to see change and reform. Ultimately, this place is all about creating the environment in which this youngish generation can rise up and take their place. We are all about the business of making the world a better place, and enabling children who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot and should not stay with their parents to move to the security, love and continuity offered often by their grandparents, but also by their wider family, is surely a really important policy objective for us to try to achieve. As she said, we must ensure that finances are never the barrier, because in my estimation, if a child can remain within the love of their family, it is the very best place for them, in many instances, to recover, and then thrive.

We know that, over and above almost every other circumstance or opportunity, the support of family is defining. We know that applies to every child from every background and every socio-economic setting. It is a defining factor in physical health, mental health, educational outcomes and life chances, so every effort should be made to try to secure the wider family stepping up to welcome in children who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot and should not stay with their parents.

In that light, the urgency that the hon. Lady described is the question of the day. We are agreed that family represents the best opportunity for children, and that kinship carers have been overlooked for too long. That urgency and pace is before us, so we await the strategy and for a number of recommendations to find form. The scale of the challenge is deep and wide, with 162,000 children cared for by their kin across England and Wales. To give a measure of the scale and scope of this sector in the shadows, that is more than double the number in foster care.

As we have heard, grandparents are of course the most common kinship carers, but grandparents increasingly have to work until later in life. The tension and the pressure of working is one very real barrier and obstacle to their being able to reach out and provide a full-time home to a child. There are perhaps more children in private arrangements that are not included in the official figures, and in such cases finance and support do not find their way to them. The census has really important information, which I hope will soon come to light, to help us to understand the scale and scope of the challenge before us.

On the financial issue, one of my constituents who attended the meeting that I arranged with kinship carers told me that she fears losing her job; she cannot get the parental leave she needs to care for her granddaughter, but without her job she cannot provide for the granddaughter she wants to offer a full-time home to. That is an excruciating tension. And another constituent described the mental anguish caused by years of court battles.

In my constituency, there is a really strong support group led by Wendy Turner, who is here with us in the Public Gallery today, so in addition to recognising the hon. Member for Twickenham, the Minister, the Government and MPs from across the House, I most particularly recognise kinship carers themselves in this really important debate, because it is their stories, their testimonies, that will really and truly land the change that we all desire. I commend them for that.

[Mr Robin Walker]

I could not resist the opportunity to pay tribute to the local kinship care group in my Worcester constituency. Kinship Carers UK, which is led by Enza Smith, has campaigned hard on this issue and first drew my attention to some of the concerns. One of the issues that the group has raised is the status of kinship carers and recognition of that status, which I think is addressed in the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Twickenham. There is a concern that when kinship carers take a child they look after for NHS care, they may not be able to take decisions in the way that a parent could. They can find it very difficult to work with the health service and other public services because of the distinction between parents and kinship carers. Is it not very important that we come up with a very clear definition of kinship carers and a clear way for them to identify themselves and their relationship to their charge, so that they can access all public services effectively?

[Caroline Ansell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; he makes an excellent point. Some means of recognition is needed, not only in healthcare but in all the different arms and institutions of public services, not least in schools, because recognition enables far swifter decision making, which is surely in the best interests of the child and those caring for them. There must be a way to achieve that recognition of status, and I look forward to the Minister telling us how such an innovation could help to rationalise the whole experience of kinship care, so that we can better address the challenges.

Interestingly, one of the members of the group of kinship carers that I met talked about guidance on how to navigate the quite complex bureaucratic situation in which they found themselves: they are responsible for a child, yet are not in a decision-making role. As an example, we spoke about a guide that had been established for the Homes for Ukraine scheme, interestingly enough, in which there was a step-by-step and issue-by-issue walkthrough to help people who were bringing Ukrainians into their home, showing them how they could navigate some of the complex systems that exist and where they could find support. The point was made to me that there is no handbook for kinship carers. There was simply a call, sometimes in the middle of the night, and then sometimes there was a social worker on the doorstep at any hour of the day, saying, “Over to you.”

Regarding some of the issues around passports and access to medical records, we can surely bring some sanity to bear on the bureaucracy, which just provides another layer of challenge and adds nothing to safeguarding or child protection. When we have put a child in the care of a family member, we should most certainly empower that family member to make decisions on behalf of the child. The point that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester made in his intervention is very well made.

While their costs are no different and their challenges certainly of similar order, unlike foster carers the vast majority of kinship carers find themselves without a minimum financial allowance to assist with the covering of expenses. The current state of financial support for kinship carers is both insufficient and marked by significant variations, not always hinging on the specific needs of the kinship families, but rather being subject to legal and geographical disparities. If we bring a new understanding to bear, surely we can create something much fairer. The current system unintentionally—perversely even—encourages kinship carers to transition into foster carers, as this is often the sole path by which they can access reliable financial and other forms of support. That does not align with the best interests of the child. The repercussions, beyond the emotional and psychological, of this lack of financial support are profound and affect both families and the state. According to the 2022 annual survey report “The Cost of Loving”, six out of 10 kinship carers reported resorting to borrowing money, taking out short-term loans, or relying on credit cards for everyday expenses in the past year.

For every 1,000 children raised in kinship families rather than placed in local authority care, the state saves £40 million and enhances the lifetime earnings of the children by £20 million, so the statistics say. I know that there are very serious pressures on children’s social care, even in my own county. A mark of this is that, just this last financial year, for the first time the cost of children’s social services outweighed the cost of adult social care. This is a very significant development: not only has that cost now overtaken that of adult social care, but its trajectory is set to escalate exponentially. We know through our work on the Education Committee that the care sector is under massive pressure, to the point where providers in the marketplace are able to charge what they will, leaving county councils competing for places. Kinship care is, in part, an answer to that very real, sustained pressure on services. Surely it merits significant investment.

Before I came to this place, my career was in education, so I know the impact that family support can have on children and young people. It was too often the very parents I needed to speak to who did not come to parents evenings. Children who have been taken from mum or dad and out of the family setting for very good reasons have experienced trauma. The fact that that is not more recognised in school is, to my mind, a burning injustice. They experience challenges with their focus and stamina, and their ability to concentrate is affected because they come from a place of trauma. It is really that clear. They need additional support as urgently as possible, because with every year of lost learning, it is exponentially harder to recover and recapture that learning.

The effects of those early years can last a lifetime if we do not rush in with more support. Schools are the strongest partners for kinship carers when it comes to rescuing these children. I am hoping the Minister, perhaps today, but ultimately as we approach the strategy, will have some encouraging words around what new provision and recognition we might see in schools, because they are important partners too.

In addition to the financial support I have spoken of—the pupil premium plus—I long to see employment leave to facilitate kinship care, particularly at the start of the placement, legal aid to take the sting out of court battles, and recognition of the work of local authorities and a just settlement, so that they can more ably meet the needs of families in their areas. I look forward to seeing progress, recognition and investment for all of those things.

Health and Social Care Workforce

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

Yes. There is a part of the workforce plan, which the Select Committee discussed a little yesterday, which talks about how, every year, every member of staff should have a conversation with their employers about their pension arrangements and mental health and wellbeing. That is fantastic. I am sceptical as to how it is remotely possible in an organisation of this size. That does not mean that I do not think the ambition is right—I think that it is right—but it would be helpful to the House if the Minister touched on that in her wind-up.

The other point I make to my right hon. Friend, which I will also make later in my speech, is that we must remember that there are NHS employers, and ultimately the Government are the employer in the widest possible sense, but the direct employer when it comes to hospitals is the trusts, and they have a big role to play in retention and in workforce health and wellbeing. We sometimes duck away from saying that, but I say that here in the House as well as privately to the chief executive of my trust.

I am encouraged by the emphasis that the workforce plan places on prevention, which everybody knows is one of my great passions in life and politics. That will clearly be crucial, given the supply and demand challenges facing the health service at the moment. Prevention is, as colleagues know, a subject dear and close to the work of the Select Committee: we have launched a major inquiry into the prevention of ill health, with 10 work- streams. We have already done the vaccination workstream and have moved on to the healthy places—home and work—workstream. Details of that are available on the Health and Social Care Committee’s website.

Let me turn to some of the specifics in the Committee’s report and what action the Government have taken. One of our key recommendations was that

“the number of medical school places in the UK should be increased by 5,000 from around 9,500 per year to 14,500.”

The plan does that: it doubles medical school training places in England to 15,000 by 2031-32, which is extremely welcome. As I said to the Prime Minister last week at the Liaison Committee, I hope it is possible to make some of those new places available before September 2025, as it says in the plan. However, with a UCAS deadline of mid-October for a September 2024 start, that looks extremely challenging. We discussed that yesterday at the Select Committee. An update from the Minister on that would be welcome.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his report. On the issue of making places available, the report talks about the 2018 to 2020 university cohort and the great success of those new university medical schools. The Government’s response echoes that. The university medical schools approved by the GMC since currently have no funded places, though they are open and are receiving students. Does he agree that it would be very welcome if there were some funded places available in those three new medical schools by the earlier deadline that he has suggested?

[Steve Brine]

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee for being a guest at yesterday’s session with the medical director of NHS England in our workforce special. He is right. The Prime Minister told me at the Liaison Committee, and the medical director said yesterday, that it will take time to scale up. Yesterday, the GMC chief executive talked about training capacity in scaling up the medical places. That is right and needs to be done. However, where the medical schools are ready—even with fairly modest numbers—for September ’24, it would be an incredibly good signal of intent from the Government to allow them to start then. The money is front-loaded, so the fiscal cycle should allow that to happen. Knowing my hon. Friend, he will not let this one go. I thank him for raising it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in such a very well-informed debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who chairs the Health Committee, for inviting me to guest with the Committee on the issues of the long-term workforce plan. I think in this, as in many other areas, there is a great deal of crossover between the work that we do on the Education Committee and the work that he does in the health space.

I join my hon. Friend in welcoming today’s announcement about the public service pay negotiations. It is very welcome news that the education unions have suspended strikes. I join him in urging the health unions to look very carefully at the offer on the table to try to do the same.

I want to raise a few points in this debate, and the first is not related to the meeting we had yesterday, nor necessarily to the main theme of the workforce plan, but it has come up through my work on the Education Committee: the pressing and urgent need to ensure that when we look at workforce, we include child and adolescent mental health services, and the resources and people available in that space. I have spoken to people at my health and care trust in Worcestershire, who interestingly told me that they feel that they are quite well resourced and have the relevant people to meet adult mental health needs, but that there is further work to be done to make sure they can adequately meet child and adolescent mental health needs. Everything I see from the school sector—including some pressures we are looking at as part of our inquiry into recruitment and retention for the teaching workforce—makes it clear that the pressing mental health pressure on schools is a big part of the challenge. Anything the Minister and the workforce plan can do to address that would be extremely welcome.

Let me turn to the very interesting Committee meeting I attended yesterday, which demonstrated the great achievement of the Health Committee, under its previous and current Chairs, in pressing for a long-term workforce plan. That is something to be celebrated, and its shows the role of this House and its cross-party Select Committees, including when it came to the weightiness of the document we were scrutinising. We heard some interesting and useful evidence about the recruitment challenge and the retention piece. I share the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester, echoing the evidence that was given to the Committee, that there is more work to do on retention and that it will require a great determination from the NHS and Ministers to address those issues in the long run.

We also heard plenty of evidence—this has also been made clear to me on a local level—that recruitment, training and upskilling the workforce can play a key role in inspiring senior doctors to stay in and play their part in bringing forward the next generation. It was interesting to hear evidence from the General Medical Council and GPs about the benefits of those doctors being able to play a part in training the next generation. I have heard the same from many doctors within the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and in our local primary care services in Worcestershire. It is one reason why we have a unanimous view from all the trusts across Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Dudley that they want to see a medical school up and running, training local students in Worcester, where we have a university that the Department values and recognises, to the extent that it has been the fastest growing nurse training university in the country over a number of years, and which the GMC has now approved to have a medical school—so far, so good; that is extremely welcome. I am grateful to the NHS and to Ministers for all the work that has gone into getting to that stage. We do, however, face a challenge.

My medical school, the Three Counties Medical School at Worcester, which serves a very large area of the country, is opening in September. It is bringing in students and has uniquely managed to find funding to support domestic students to start their medical training without funded places allocated by what used to be Health Education England and is now part of NHS England. The challenge is that the funding is finite. It has enough funding—which has been raised locally from local health trusts and charitable donations—to support a cohort of 20 students to start this September and to take them all the way through their training at the university, and hopefully onwards into the NHS.

Clearly, 20 students is not a large enough cohort to sustain a medical school, so alongside those 20 students in the first intake, there will be 28 international students. The evidence we heard yesterday was interesting on this point. I think we all recognise, and the report that the Select Committee published recognises, the benefit of international recruitment to the NHS. We absolutely want to attract talent, but we also need to recognise—as per the many arguments I have as Chair of the Education Committee when it comes to international students in general—that the majority of international students do leave; they do not necessarily stay and work long term in the NHS.

If we want to solve the recruitment and retention problem in the long run, we need to train more of our own doctors. We need to train those doctors locally. In health, just as in teaching, many people who train in a particular area are likely to stay in that area and pursue their careers there. That is also something that has been put to me over many years by my local trust and my local GPs as a reason to have a three counties medical school in Worcestershire.

I am very grateful for the support that the NHS and colleagues on the Front Bench have provided over the years in marching us up the hill to a position where the building is there, the university will be opening that medical school this year and the first students will be starting. That is fantastic.

My concern, and it is a concern shared by many colleagues—six Worcestershire MPs wrote to the Health Secretary last week about it—is that where the long-term plan, which is extremely welcome in most respects, sets out the plan to double medical training places, it carries the line:

“The first new medical school places will be available from September 2025.”

The three universities that have been given the go-ahead to host a medical school—Worcester, Brunel and Chester—have not yet had the opportunity to bid for funding places, so that date is frustrating. It means that, after the first year’s intake of locally trained domestic students at the Three Counties Medical School, we have the slightly bizarre potential for the following year’s intake to be entirely international students. I hope the NHS and Ministers can avert that, because it does not make sense from either a value for money or a long-term workforce planning perspective.

I appreciate that I did not give my hon. Friend the Minister advance notice of my intention to speak in this debate, so I do not expect her to be able to answer all my questions. However, I ask her to take this issue away and ensure that the Health Secretary looks very carefully at the letter he has received from all the Worcestershire MPs. I understand that the University of Worcester will also be writing to NHS England to make the case for additional funded places this year—that would be wonderful, but I appreciate that it would be very difficult—and for an allocation of funded places next year.

That is certainly something worth considering. It would help with recruitment, with retention and with some of the challenges that our local health service in Worcestershire has wrestled with for a long time—challenges that I am well aware of, having spoken to trust leaders and doctors in all areas of the NHS. Not only would it benefit us in Worcestershire, but it has the support and the placements are already there. That is crucial, because I understand the reasoning given in the NHS workforce plan is that the Government and the NHS need time to work out where the placements are and where they are required.

It is already clear that there are well over 100 placements available across Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Dudley and Herefordshire for the medics when they come out of that training, so that problem is solved. It is already a four-year, graduate entry course, so the problem of long courses and things taking too long is also solved. I encourage colleagues on the Front Bench to engage with the request and see whether we can make the workforce plan even better by getting those funded places going at the universities that the General Medical Council has already determined are ready to go, to help meet the workforce challenge.

One other thing I would say, having listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester and some of the debate yesterday on the Select Committee, is that no single Department has a monopoly on wisdom. As Select Committees, we are there not only to challenge and to criticise, but to welcome things when they go right. I was quite struck by the discussion of the importance of retaining trainers and the pressures currently facing them in the NHS, which the GMC raised concerns about.

We face a similar challenge in the education space, and the early career framework, designed to support teachers starting their careers in schools, is a very interesting model to look at—particularly when we look at the importance of mentoring and, for teachers, off-timetable hours to get that mentoring. There may be similar things that could be designed into the NHS; I would not claim to be any kind of an expert on that, but it is worth looking to see whether there are elements of that model that could even further strengthen the very welcome NHS long-term workforce plan.

Adult and Further Education

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee and the Liaison Committee for their support in approving this debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) on her powerful opening speech on the hugely important topic of adult education, which forms one of the themes that we are debating today. She and I were before the Backbench Business Committee with our respective applications for debates on FE and college funding, and on adult education. We both agreed that, as both applications related to the education estimates, we would be happy to combine them. I share her admiration for the work of FE colleges and the community education sector in this space, as well as the important online work that they do. I echo her comments about the huge importance of adult literacy.

I hope that the House will forgive me if I focus mostly on the 16 to 19 element of this debate. I thank the Education Committee Clerks and members for the huge work that they have put into our report on the future of post-16 qualifications, which I hope we can discuss at some length today. I also thank the House of Commons Library and the Association of Colleges for the valuable briefings that they have provided.

Before delving into the detail, I should say that, as Chair of the Education Committee, I welcome the fact that the overall estimate for the Department for Education has increased, and that we are debating estimates today that see the total amount, across resource and capital, rise from £100 billion to £110 billion. We are spending substantial amounts of money on education. The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), has been a tireless advocate for the FE sector, which he has often described as the “Cinderella sector” of education. As he has pointed out many times, that reflects not just how much it is asked to do with so little resource, but that there is no limit to its potential. As he has often said, Cinderella herself ended up marrying into royalty.

My right hon. Friend’s campaigning helped to secure extra hours for post-16 students as part of the catch-up programme, and his determination to support lifelong learning is as welcome for the FE sector as it should be for higher education. As Chair of the Education Committee, he recommended that the Department make the case for a three-year funding settlement for community learning at the next spending review, and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for providers. Part of the reason that I—his successor as Chair of the Committee—wanted to debate the funding for that vital sector, and indeed for wider post-16 education, is that it has been, and still is, facing a very real funding squeeze.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has reported that the FE sector has experienced a prolonged period of reduced funding, and concluded in December 2022 that 16 to 19 funding had experienced the biggest fall in real-terms funding of any education sector, in contrast with real-terms growth in primary and secondary schools, and a rapid and welcome growth in early years investment.

[Darren Henry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Having further education facilities is so important for developing new skills, unlocking careers and training people for new industries. We are soon to lose our main FE provider in my Broxtowe constituency, as Nottingham College moves out. On the point that my hon. Friend was making, does he agree that we need to increase FE funding so that we can provide more FE and skills provision for local communities?

[Mr Walker]

I agree. I am sure that my hon. Friend will champion the need for FE in his area, under whatever branding or name it might come. I absolutely agree that we need to see an increase. I will come to more of the reasons for that shortly.

The IFS also reported that colleges and sixth forms have seen a long-term decline in spending per student relative to schools. That goes all the way back to the 1990s, when their funding was around double that of primaries. In 2022-23, it was lower than spending per pupil in secondary schools and only 11% to 12% higher than spending per pupil in primary schools. The report noted that although extra funding in the 2019 and 2021 spending reviews meant real-terms increases in funding per student up to 2024-25, those will only partially reverse previous years of cuts and the impact of increasing numbers up to 2030. It is important to note that that analysis came before the high and persistent rates of inflation that we have seen over the past six months. In real terms, the analysis from the IFS shows that both sixth forms and FE colleges have seen a substantial reduction in per pupil funding since 2018, and have lost close to £1,000 per pupil since 2015.

Why does that matter? We will all know from our constituencies—my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) has just given an example—about the hugely important work of the FE sector and local sixth forms in preparing students for academic and vocational qualifications that offer them a brighter future. They are quite literally engines of social mobility.

I am incredibly proud of the work of Heart of Worcestershire College in my constituency and the excellent Worcester Sixth Form College, and I regularly visit both institutions to celebrate their students’ success. I put on record my thanks to the recently departed principal of Heart of Worcestershire College, Stuart Laverick, who was a great champion for the college and the sector. I look forward to working closely with his successor, Michelle Dowse. We also have a number of smaller providers, including schools that operate sixth forms—Christopher Whitehead Language College and Tudor Grange Academy—which, alongside our popular and successful sixth-form college, increase the choice and range of options for post-16 pupils in Worcester. It is fair to say that all those schools regularly raise with me their concerns about funding.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

I will take this opportunity to put on record my thanks to East Sussex College. It is equally as high-performing as Worcester and is the social mobility engine that my hon. Friend described. However, the finances, which he referred to, mean that it is in a very competitive field for the workforce. It is squeezed between schools and higher education. That means they struggle to recruit the quality, highly skilled staff that it needs to take us further and higher and to deliver on the Government’s priorities. Does he recognise that scenario?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

I absolutely recognise that scenario, and I welcome that contribution from my hon. Friend, another Education Committee member. We heard that loud and clear as part of our inquiry and I continue to hear it from local providers. They compete not just with schools and higher education, but with the businesses for which they provide the skills, so there is an extra retention challenge for this sector.

This is a crucial part of our education system: the pathway for some between school and higher education; and for others, between school and vocational success, whether that is through apprenticeships or T-levels; and for others still, an introduction to the world of work. For many students who find schools hard to engage with, colleges can also provide a welcome cultural shift, with greater flexibility and independence as they move towards adulthood. Colleges play an essential and increasingly valuable role in preparing young people to be the workforce of tomorrow.

The Prime Minister has described education as “the closest thing we have to a silver bullet”, and in that respect the challenge he has set for more people to study mathematics until age 18 is welcome. However, that challenge can be met only if we fund post-16 education properly.

The Minister has never made any secret of his passion for vocational education and of his determination to see it gain parity of esteem in our education system. He has championed FE and colleges through a long and distinguished career as a Minister and a Select Committee Chair. It is from him that I inherited the inquiry into post-16 qualifications, on which the Education Committee recently reported. I have to say, with the greatest respect, that we were disappointed with some elements of his response to the inquiry, which the Committee published today.

The Committee heard evidence from a wide variety of post-16 providers, from colleges, academics, teaching unions and educational experts, and we heard a great deal that is positive about the direction of travel and the drive to raise attainment. However, we also heard consistent and extensive evidence on the resource, recruitment and retention challenge.

We made two particularly important recommendations: for a widespread review of spending on FE and post-16 education, which goes to the heart of today’s debate; and for a moratorium on defunding advanced general qualifications until the T-level route has been more firmly proven. Both recommendations were agreed unanimously by every Committee member from both major parties—seven Committee members are on the Government side of the House—at the end of a long and detailed inquiry. I am disappointed that amid much interesting commentary on the detail of our report and the Government’s position, the Minister appears to have accepted neither of those key recommendations.

[Mrs Flick Drummond]

As a member of the Education Committee, may I say that my hon. Friend is making some excellent points? Another point about the roll-out of T-levels is that there may be no places for people doing advanced general qualifications because they do not cover the same subjects. Quite a lot of 16-year-olds will therefore miss out on the areas that they particularly want to study, because the T-levels have not been rolled out and yet AGQs are being defunded.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend reflects the concerns—amply spelled out in the report—about not removing pathways to success and routes forward for students while the T-level programme is, as yet, not fully developed and not fully proven. I think we all accept that T-levels can be a very valuable part of the landscape.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Walker]

I am happy to give way to the Opposition spokesman.

[Mr Perkins]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene. Regarding his Committee’s call for a moratorium, the Labour party is committed to that. We entirely agree with him, and while he will not be in Parliament after the next election, he can be assured that if we have a Labour Government, the call he has made today will be supported.

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that clarification. I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister is listening carefully. I know he is not averse to making the case to the Treasury for funding, so I urge him to take from this debate the strong cross-party consensus, reflected in the Committee’s recommendation in paragraph 179 of our report, that:

“To prevent a further narrowing of 16-19 education, the Committee urges the Government to undertake a wholesale review of 16-19 funding, including offering more targeted support for disadvantaged students.”

[Caroline Ansell]

Before my hon. Friend moves any further into his excellent speech, the witnesses to our inquiry were compelling when describing the impact of defunding on particular cohorts of students. On the impact of defunding BTECs, for example, they talked about vulnerable groups, including those with special educational needs. Does my hon. Friend agree that for those groups, it is especially important that we keep open those pathways to success?

[Mr Walker]

Yes, absolutely. My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to that specific issue; I was going to come back to it later and touch on the fact that it was partly the equalities impact of those decisions that led the Select Committee to its unanimous recommendation.

I will focus briefly on the element of targeted support for disadvantaged students in our recommendation that I just touched on. I recently took part in an inquiry of the all-party parliamentary group for students, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield)—I should call him the hon. Gentleman, but I call him my hon. Friend because we have worked together for a long time. That was an eye-opening inquiry, which reinforced the need for an urgent review of support for the most disadvantaged in the FE sector.

The Government have rightly increased the level of pupil premium in schools, and have used programmes such as the holiday activities and food programme and the levelling-up premium to keep up a relentless focus on tackling disadvantage. However, there is concern about the support available for disadvantaged students in FE, and widespread worry that the available bursaries just do not go far enough. The extension of the pilot for pupil premium-plus to post-16 students was welcome, but we have to query why the extra support for that age group is so much lower than the extra support available to pupils under 16. My constituent Harrison Ricketts, who was in Parliament today to support a Youth Employment UK event, gave powerful and reasoned testimony to the APPG’s inquiry about the pressures facing students. I hope Ministers will look carefully at some of the recommendations in that report, which are pretty reasonable and not necessarily very expensive.

In fairness, there are elements of the Minister’s response to the Education Committee report that I welcome. The response expanded on investments for the financial year 2023-24. The Government state that they

“will invest £125 million in increasing funding rates for 16-19 education, including a 2.2% increase in the national funding rate for academic year 23/24…and an increase in funding for specific high value subject areas in engineering, construction and digital to help institutions with the additional costs of recruiting and retaining teachers in these vocational areas.”

With regard to supporting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, the Government draw the Committee’s attention to the 16-to-19 bursary fund, and state that in the last academic year,

“almost £152 million of 16-19 Bursary funding has been allocated to providers to help disadvantaged 16-19-year-olds with costs such as travel, books, equipment and trips, an increase of over 12% on the previous year.”

The response also states that the Government will continue to approve the international baccalaureate diploma for funding, and clarifies that they did not say—as I think the Committee took them to have said—that they will withdraw funding for the international baccalaureate careers programme.

I want to expand on the recommendation about the level 3 qualifications review, which we have debated at some length. The concern of the Committee is not that we do not believe in pursuing high-quality and high-value qualifications such as T-levels; we are concerned about the pace with which the Department is pursuing that course, and the risks of removing advanced general qualifications where students currently find them a valuable pathway to progression. A wider review of funding could help find the resource to maintain a wider choice for students, more flexibility and a range of routes to progression, including T-levels. We have highlighted significant equalities concerns if Ministers persist with the current approach, and we do not feel that those concerns were properly or fully addressed in the Government’s response, which we published today.

I do not have time today to detain the House on all the recommendations in our report, but I will highlight the need to address the issue of workforce if we are to deliver on the Prime Minister’s very worthy ambition of more people taking maths to the age of 18. In our inquiry on teacher retention and recruitment, we have heard worrying evidence about the extent to which the Department has missed its targets on maths teacher recruitment, and in the first session of that inquiry the Committee heard from the FE sector that whatever problems exist for retention in the schools system are compounded in the post-16 space. Around 25% of college teachers leave the profession after just one year compared with around 15% of teachers in schools, and three years in, around half of college teachers have left compared with around a quarter of schoolteachers.

In fairness, I should acknowledge some welcome elements in the Minister’s response in this regard, such as the updated teacher support fund, the national professional qualification for leaders in primary maths and the expansion of the Taking Teaching Further programme for further education, but I am not convinced that these small initiatives fully address the scale of the challenge.

[Mrs Drummond]

My hon. Friend is making some good points, but there are two issues. First, bursaries to do maths are £29,000, yet when maths lecturers go into the workplace they only get £26,000, so their pay is automatically reduced. The other problem is that the pay rise for further education was only 2.5%, when of course teachers got 5%. That is one reason why retention is so poor.

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend raises two very valid challenges. It is also worth noting that the IFS analysis shows a significant disparity in pay between college teachers and schoolteachers, even before that pay rise issue. That gap has grown over time, rising from 14% in 2010 to 21% today. These are, of course, the very teachers we rely on to get our children the highest qualifications in their time in school or college, to achieve the Prime Minister’s levelling-up ambitions and to inspire the workforce of tomorrow.

To touch on that very briefly, in our inquiry into careers education, advice and guidance, we heard from young people around the country who told us how much better in many cases the careers advice and guidance they received was in college than in school. The consensus was that many of them were only properly exposed to vocational opportunities, apprenticeships or the importance of the world of work once they reached college. Surely where our colleges are succeeding, we should ensure that they are rewarded for that work, and where they are not being given parity with other parts of the education system, this should be queried.

Just yesterday, I attended the launch of the Foundation for Economic Development’s latest report on a national education consultation, and heard its call for a long-term plan for education. This highlighted the importance of parity across all areas of education and the strong case for levelling up both early years and post-16 funding. It called for a 10-year plan for education to match the ambition of the very welcome long-term plan for the NHS workforce that the Government delivered last week.

The Association of Colleges has made the case for a five-step plan, which I believe the Government should carefully consider and to which I would be very grateful for the Minister’s response today. The hon. Member for Wirral West has already mentioned raising the 2023-24 funding rates in line with inflation, which is its first recommendation.

The second recommendation is to allow colleges to reclaim VAT. Colleges are now public sector organisations, but unlike councils, schools and academies, they cannot reclaim VAT. They spend an estimated £210 million a year on VAT that they cannot reclaim, and they see this as a tax on FE students. This strikes me as a sensible and timely recommendation, following the Office for National Statistics’ decision to reclassify the FE estate, and it would appear to be an opportunity to give the sector a much-needed Brexit bonus, given the greater flexibility the Treasury now has on VAT rules.

The third recommendation is to ensure that 50% of the apprenticeship levy is spent on apprentices at levels 2 and 3 and below the age of 25, echoing a concern picked up in the Select Committee report that so much of the apprenticeship levy is now going to older students. We do not begrudge the fact that there are higher apprenticeships and opportunities for people to go further, but we do want to make sure there is a balance that keeps the door open for people to enter the workplace through an apprenticeship.

The fourth recommendation is the need for a bigger skills fund to support skills in high priority areas, and the fifth recommendation is about the college pay analysis, which the hon. Lady has already addressed. While I appreciate that the Minister will face many challenges in delivering on all those recommendations, I believe that they merit careful consideration and a full response.

I believe that responding to those recommendations could make a real difference for my constituents. I have spoken to the new principal at the Heart of Worcestershire College about what could be achieved if they were addressed, and I was given the following examples. The college has had to limit growth in electrical installation due to its inability to attract additional staff in this area. If the college could attract one additional staff member, it could train an additional 30 students per year in electrical installation to meet the growing demands in that sector.

The college aims to have a gas centre in Worcester for conventional gas fitting, but also to take advantage of the developments in hydrogen-ready and hydrogen boilers and other sustainable technologies. It has advertised a position for that role on many occasions, but the low salaries just are not attracting candidates, and the gas centre project has therefore had to be put on hold.

Construction is a key growth area in our economy in Worcestershire and across the UK. Heart of Worcestershire College has struggled to recruit staff, so there have been ongoing delays to apprenticeships. As a result, the college has had to recruit several short-term agency staff.

Heart of Worcestershire College has struggled to recruit learning support staff, at a time when young people need more support than ever, post covid, to ensure that they reach their maximum potential and are work-ready. As part of its special educational needs and disabilities work, the Committee heard about the crucial importance of young people getting the right support in the right place at the right time, and that absolutely must include our colleges.

I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to keep making the case, as I am sure he will, for an increase in the estimates for FE, post-16 education and colleges, but also to consider again the detailed proposals from the Select Committee inquiry he launched and from the Association of Colleges and so many others. I welcome the fact that the Government have set out to create a ladder of opportunity for students, and I recognise my right hon. Friend’s passion for delivering that. I also welcome the fact that much has been done for the colleges in my constituency, including the consolidation of Heart of Worcestershire College on its riverside site, the refurbishment of its apprenticeship training centre and the delivery of a skills centre, as well as the expansion of our sixth-form college and much-needed improvements to its buildings and facilities. I am also grateful to the Minister for his detailed response to the Committee’s report, but I am disappointed that he could not go further on a funding review or on the moratorium on defunding advanced general qualifications, and I challenge him to make the case for both with the Treasury on the back of this debate.

The Minister himself has described this sector as having been a Cinderella sector for too long. It is high time we gave post-16 education the parity of funding and the parity of esteem it deserves. It is time for Cinderella to go to the ball.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Western]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and he is a champion for further education in his constituency. I quite agree that pay for the further education teaching workforce has lagged behind teaching salaries more broadly for some time. This is a growing crisis, which is leading to a loss of opportunities for our young people. I absolutely agree that the Government are failing on that and need to address it urgently.

Holding colleges back with inadequate funding to both address their workforce crisis and reverse the cuts since 2010 is the ultimate false economy, but that is exactly what is happening. Despite recent uplifts, the truth is that further education funding compares extremely unfavourably with both university and school funding.

The latest IFS annual report on education spending in England found that further education spending per student aged 16 to 18 in 2022-23 was £6,800, which is lower than spending per pupil in secondary schools and only 11% to 12% greater than per pupil funding in primary schools, having been more than two times greater in the early 1990s. The hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) made a similar point with that data earlier.

[Mr Robin Walker]

indicated assent.

[Andrew Western]

The report acknowledged that extra funding announced in the 2019 and 2021 spending reviews would result in real increases in funding per student up to 2024-25. However, that only partially reverses earlier cuts, and increasing numbers of 16 to 18-year-olds up to 2030 will put further pressure on finances after 2024, when departmental spending plans have been scaled back. The director of the IFS has himself said the Government’s real-term cuts to further education are:

“not a set of priorities consistent with a long term growth strategy. Or indeed levelling up.”

In contrast, the Labour party sees how a thriving further education sector is essential to growth. That is why a Labour Government will create a skills system that works for businesses and for people across our country, by reforming the apprenticeships levy, devolving skills budgets and delivering a national mission to upskill, led by a new Skills England. Devolving skills budgets in particular is something I would welcome after seeing, from my time leading Trafford Council and as the work and skills lead for Greater Manchester, the real need for skills policy to be better aligned and integrated with regional economic policy and local labour markets, to deliver a more localised, tailored approach to skills provision. In short, colleges, like those currently doing great work in the Trafford—and indeed Stockport—area, have a critical role to play in any plans to grow the economy, but they need support and investment to be able to do that after years of declining funding for adults’ and young people’s education.

I hope that when the Minister replies, he will set out what further support and investment will be provided to Trafford College, and colleges like it across the country, to tackle the workforce crisis that is holding them back, holding students back and holding our local, regional and national economy back, too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

I have worked in the further education sector for 22 years—I hear the Minister’s inner voice saying, “No! Surely that means my hon. Friend started teaching in FE when she was still at primary school,” but unfortunately that is not the case—so I have a lot of experience of the absolutely glorious things that further education can do, but I have also seen it warts and all.

People seem to forget that the further education sector, alongside schools, interacts with more members of the public than any other sector. Adult education, community education, 16 to 19, apprenticeships and higher education are all provided for within the further education sector. Even when I was learning to be a lecturer and doing teacher training all those years ago, the sector was called the Cinderella sector. It has always been acknowledged that it has done a lot of the heavy lifting from an educational perspective, but it has rarely been given the same funding as schools and, in particular, universities. The university sector does a wonderful job, but a university lecturer will generally deliver about half as many hours of actual contact time in a year as a further education lecturer.

The teams do a fantastic and very varied job, but I have heard a lot about how we need more funding, and of course every sector will always ask for more funding. I am pleased the Department for Education is increasing funding into all the sectors mentioned, but we do have a particular issue, as many Members of the House have said, about how much salary we are able to pay people coming into teaching, or taking part in teaching, and to technicians, assistants or whatever it might be in the further education sector. We might want to attract engineering lecturers, for instance, but someone would have to be crazy, or have a private income that meant they could just work as a hobby, to even look at doing an engineering teaching job if it did not start at £55,000 a year at least. That is because they could go and work anywhere else and start at that salary or a lot more.

That is a perennial problem in the industry, and I would like the Government to look at it. I understand that the issue really is challenging in the current climate, but if we do not start to look at it, we will end up with an ever-increasing problem. We already have skills shortages, ergo, in five, 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, not only will even fewer people want to go into further education but even fewer will have the skills and industry experience to do so. As a country, we really have to take this issue seriously in order to see where we are going.

[Mr Robin Walker]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as I knew she would given her experience in the sector. We see this particular challenge in engineering, maths and physics. Does she agree that the Prime Minister’s aspiration of getting everyone doing maths until 18 is exciting in that context, but that it requires supporting the workforce in our FE colleges to deliver it? We need that breadth of teaching of mathematics, alongside other key skills.

[Lia Nici]

I thank my hon. Friend for his expertise, and he is absolutely right. However, many students when I was teaching struggled with their maths GCSE. They struggled with their basic skills and functional skills in numeracy. There was still a fairy tale, seemingly, that if someone had studied mathematics for 11 years in school and failed their GCSE, magically the further education sector—everybody seems to think it can do everything magically and often it does—in less than one year can produce a grade C or above, or a grade 4 or 5 and above, as the grades are now. There was this idea that someone who had failed at maths, hated maths and was scared about it could study for nine months part-time—maybe for one hour a week—in their college and would suddenly and magically have a maths GCSE. That is not the reality.

When I was head of department, all the mathematics we used to teach was applied, and further education has still not been able to do that across the board. That is often because we cannot find people who can teach maths confidently. Certainly we find it difficult to find people who can teach functional skills, numeracy or maths that is applied to the industry for which the students are coming to study. We have some real problems. For instance, I taught a group of level 2 media students once. I said to them, “I am giving you a tape measure, and I want you to go into the studio. We are going to calculate the square meterage of the studio so that we can do a lighting plan.” The students went off and within a minute they came back. They said, “Lia, we are having a problem here.” I said, “Why?” They said, “Because the tape measure is not long enough.” Think about that for a moment. Those students did not think that perhaps they had to measure it multiple times with one tape measure. Those are the basic skills we are talking about. I had to go into the studio and talk about it. That is the level we are at.

Schools are struggling to recruit maths teachers. I love the aspiration that everyone can be better at maths through to 18, but I always have the analogy of saying, “If you do not feel you are good at maths, equate that to something that you really don’t like”, because a lot of people have a fear of maths, or have been told over years, “You are not good enough at it”, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say to people, “Do you like horses?” They say, “No, I’m scared of horses.” I say, “Okay, so you’re scared of horses and horse-riding. You’ve never wanted to do it, or when you’ve tried it, you’ve hated it, or you’ve fallen off or you’ve never dared to get on. Tomorrow, I will make you go to a horse and get on it. You are going to have to ride it for an hour every week for nine months, but boy, you will be an Olympic showjumper by the end of it.” We need to think about how we will do these things, because we know as a country that we are a potential powerhouse in so many areas, but we have to think with common sense about how we will overcome some of the difficulties that we have.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)]

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), and the hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) for initiating this useful debate.

Further education colleges have a wealth of experience in delivering learning, training and qualifications in their local communities, and that includes the fantastic Loughborough College in my constituency. They have a unique understanding of the skills gap through their relationship with businesses, industry and other local stakeholders, which enables them to adapt the courses they offer to help to skill young people, as well as upskilling and reskilling workers to meet the needs of the local economy in real time and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. That makes them essential to our local communities and crucial to economic growth.

The country should make much more of, in particular, the flexibility of FE colleges to tailor the skills and training made available to meet local need, although we have already done that to some extent through the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022. Let me give an example involving Loughborough College. Not long ago, a business was thinking of coming to the area, but needed a workforce that was skilled in a certain way. I contacted the principal of Loughborough College by email, and she came back to me within about 10 minutes, having already contacted the business and reached an agreement on what they would do. Such flexibility and deliverability of that kind are available to the whole town of Loughborough and the local area because of what the FE college can deliver.

As the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on T-levels, I am also immensely proud of the fact that at the heart of Loughborough College is one of the first T-level centres built with town deal funding. The college will have an institute of technology, which it will be building along with Loughborough University, the Derby College Group and Derby University. The Minister, very kindly, officially opened the centre, and broke ground at the IOT not long ago. All those developments have been brought together by a phenomenal staffing team, and an equally phenomenal principal and chief executive, Jo Maher. I have named her because I want to thank her very much: she has done an enormous amount for people in Loughborough, and has achieved a huge amount in a very short space of time. She is moving on, but thankfully she is staying in Loughborough to become the university’s pro vice-chancellor for sport—and it doesn’t get much better than being in charge of sport at Loughborough University, let’s put it that way. She has achieved an amazing thing, along with all her staff, the governors and others. It is an amazingly proud moment for the town. The college has everything from T-level engineering to courses on health and social care and training for electricians and nursery staff. There are people who are going to make fantastic emergency service workers, prison officers and so on. It is a wonderful draw for the whole region to get those skills into the area.

For FE colleges to continue to deliver much-needed skills education, we must ensure that they are placed on a sustainable footing by addressing their historic levels of underfunding. Despite recent uplifts, FE college funding compares unfavourably with funding for universities and schools. As colleges spend 67% of their income on staff, current budgets are having a detrimental effect on recruitment.

Many colleges are being constrained in their ability to provide training at the level necessary to address skills shortages, because they cannot offer salaries competitive enough to attract the right people, who can earn far more in industry and even in schools. To reinforce that point, the Association of Colleges has informed me that, on average, teachers in schools are paid over £8,000 more than college lecturers, despite many college lecturers being more specialised and bringing real-life industry experience to their roles. That concern has also been raised with me locally. Salaries in the private sector are used to attract people with skills and knowledge; the same should be true in FE colleges.

Alongside the issue of additional funding in these areas, Loughborough College has highlighted to me that despite now being considered essentially to be public bodies by HM Treasury, colleges are not able to reclaim VAT as the vast majority of public bodies do. I have been told that this tax currently uses up 3% of a college’s income. The money voted for by Parliament for 16 to 19 education in a wide variety of key sectors is being taxed, which is disproportionately affecting those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who make up the majority of those attending college. It is compounded by the fact that, following ONS reclassification, an immediate block on commercial borrowing was placed on colleges.

That has left colleges stuck between a rock and a hard place: unable to receive private funding, as they are considered to be a public body, but having to pay VAT as if they were a private entity. It is therefore important that due consideration is given to including colleges in the VAT refund scheme. That simple change would go a long way towards helping colleges to provide the high-quality skills training that our economy needs.

[Mr Robin Walker]

In these debates, we have heard a lot about parity. Does my hon. Friend agree that now that there is greater flexibility, the Government should look across the education sector and ensure that early years settings, colleges and others are given parity with schools in their treatment for VAT purposes?

[Jane Hunt]

I absolutely agree. I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention.

FE colleges such as Loughborough College are our greatest asset in local communities and the best conduit for social mobility. Let us reform the sector for the future, so that they have the tools and resources in place to make the difference to the lives of their students and to the businesses where they will go on to work. I want to put it in a positive rather than a negative way: yes, we need to look at the money and look at the VAT, but there is such fantastic resource within FE colleges. It is all there to be had. Let us do that, and let us help them.

Professional Rugby: West Midlands

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I am very grateful for the opportunity to debate Government support for professional rugby in the west midlands. Last year, I secured what was almost certainly the most closely watched Adjournment debate I have ever had to raise concerns about the dire situation at Worcester Warriors rugby club and to ask Ministers to intervene. I do not propose to detain the House by repeating all the points I made in that debate about the huge value of that club to the community I represent, its passionate following and the role it has played in bringing families and generations together, but all that remains as true today as it was then. It is still the case that locally there is deep hurt about the threat to a key element of the late great Cecil Duckworth’s outstanding legacy to the city. The difference now is that we do not currently have a professional men’s rugby team in Worcester, and that is a matter of great concern to me and to thousands of my Worcester constituents. I remain as determined as ever to bring back professional elite rugby at Sixways, and to see the name Worcester Warriors back at the forefront of rugby union in this country.

Along with the Warriors, we have now seen more of the greatest names in English rugby union enter administration—Wasps and London Irish. In the context of this debate, it is worth noting that the west midlands has gone from having a choice of two teams in the rugby premiership to having none. The only remaining professional rugby union side in the west midlands is Coventry in the championship, and the sustainability of that league is being questioned almost daily.

That is not to say that rugby or even professional rugby is dead in Worcester. It is worth celebrating the ongoing success of the Warriors women’s team, and the remarkable band of local businesses and supporters that have come together to keep them going. It is fantastic that the Warriors women remain in the top flight of women’s rugby—the Allianz Premier 15s—and their victories over the DMP Sharks and Loughborough Lightning and the draw against Harlequins attest to the fact this remains a brilliantly competitive team. I am hugely grateful to Cube International, EBC, Adam Hewitt and others that have made that possible through their sponsorship, and to the brilliant Jo Yapp and Josh Payne, who held things together amid the most difficult circumstances imaginable to ensure that the team could first return to the competition in November last year and then secure its place for next season, as was announced in March. I congratulate the entire team on the example of resilience and true Warriors spirit that they have shown.

That we had a stadium for the Warriors women’s team to play in, and that this team and the men’s team survived the pandemic at all, was partly thanks to the vital support that the Government provided to get sport in general and rugby union in particular through the pandemic. In talking about Government support for professional sports, it is worth noting that without the £600 million sport survival package overseen by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, £88 million of which went to premier rugby clubs, very few clubs would have survived that generational challenge. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that, in its aftermath, there remain very significant challenges to overcome.

I do not have time in a short Adjournment debate to run through the whole saga of mismanagement and the journey to administration that we have been through, nor to go into the detail about the very different situation, with the same tragic end result, at Wasps. What is clear is that the financial model of professional rugby union is going through a period of profound challenge, and it is vital that the regulators of the sport show that they recognise the extent of this and take rapid action to address it.

I welcome the commitment that the Rugby Football Union made in the aftermath of Warriors and then Wasps going into administration to keep both academies going and to run them as two different streams going forward. The Warriors academy is a really important organisation, with a fantastic track record of producing international players and some valuable links in local education—many of which I have spoken about in education debates. To be sustainable in the long run, however, it needs a professional club to feed into.

I recognise the pressures on the RFU to treat clubs equally and to stand by the precedents it has set, but I am deeply concerned that its decision in the case of both the Warriors and Wasps that the only way back into professional rugby is to go all the way down to the bottom of the amateur pyramid is self-defeating. It risks removing the prospect of professional rugby from large areas of the country, most notably the west midlands, and disincentivising investment, which is vital in meeting its ambition of growing the game.

Investors who are keen to make a commitment to professional rugby are likely to be deterred by such a long journey to get there, and it seems bizarre that in rugby union—unlike in almost any other sport or sector of the economy—new investors who want to take a business out of administration are treated in the same way as related parties to those who took it in. I query the logic of the RFU’s position that any club that goes into administration should henceforth be treated as a phoenix. Most of us with experience of the business world would understand a phoenix situation to apply when, and only when, the former owners of a business or related parties to them seek to bring a business out of administration, but the current RFU guidelines require any new investor, even when they have no relation to the previous ones, to spend a long period in special measures and with extra supervision. A level playing field for supervision and greater transparency with the regulator is absolutely right in professional rugby, and the saga of the Warriors under the previous ownership very much demonstrates the need for it, but I worry that in creating extra hurdles for new investors to take a club forward and provide the investment to keep a club in professional rugby, the RFU is shooting itself in the foot when it comes to the sustainability of the professional game.

The requirement to go all the way down to the bottom of the amateur pyramid has resulted in the loss of some great names from professional top-flight rugby before, but never before has it denuded a whole region of its premiership representation. With both Wasps and Worcester out of the top flight, we face exactly that.

In the case of Worcester, there is an additional challenge in that we have a strong and well-established amateur rugby side that split from the Warriors when it went professional—another key part of Cecil Duckworth’s legacy to the city. Worcester rugby football club, which was first established in 1871, is alive and well and flourishing at its Offerton Lane home, just up the road from Sixways, but it has no desire to compete for players with any Warriors side on its way back up the pyramid, and while it constantly shows good will to efforts to bring professional rugby back to Sixways, it would understandably be concerned about any route to do so that put it directly in competition with another local team going up the leagues.

The consequences of losing professional men’s rugby union in a community like Worcester are severe. There has been the loss of jobs for players and staff alike, who moved heaven and earth to keep the show on the road during the last season but through no fault of their own have been unable to return to work. There has been the loss of income to the excellent Warriors Community Foundation, which has recently had to announce its departure from Sixways and its decision to move to a more costly city centre location. There are the fans of the professional game who have to travel far further to watch rugby, whether down the motorway to Gloucester or across to Coventry. Fans are united in saying they want the Warriors back, and MPs, councils and local businesses have all come together in stating their ambition to see professional elite rugby return to Sixways as soon as possible.

Recently, at a meeting held at Offerton Lane, Worcester Warriors fans set up a supporters trust with a view to bringing back professional rugby as swiftly as possible. Supporters trusts have played a crucial role in getting many football clubs back into contention, with Wimbledon and Wrexham being notable examples, and many supporters of the Warriors are keen to see if the model can be used in rugby.

The new owner of the club and stadium, Atlas, has itself stated that it wants fan ownership to play an increased role in the future of the club, and I strongly urge Atlas to sit down with the newly formed supporters trust to see how they can work together to achieve this. If a supporters trust can get a share of the ownership at a club such as the Warriors, I hope the Minister will consider how the Government can support them.

It is fair to acknowledge that there has been much concern about the plans of the new owners. Fans, who underwent a deeply traumatic period in the run-up and during the club’s administration understandably want more transparency from the new owners as to their future plans for the stadium and their club.

There has been much debate and huge scepticism about proposals for a rebrand or to take over another local club and bring it to Worcester. For my part, I am clear that we need to see the Worcester Warriors brand maintained, and fans made that abundantly clear to the new owners at the forum they held in February. At that time, they did seem to have listened, and I hope that shortly they will be more forthcoming about what their plans are for building back up to professional rugby in the shortest possible timescale. There have been suggestions of touring sides or demonstration matches, and rumours of concerts and other public events, but fans need clarity and they need it soon.

I remind the new owners and any prospective investor in Sixways of the clear statement by councils—including Wychavon, which is the planning authority for the stadium—MPs and key supporters of the club that the only way development will be approved at or around Sixways will be if it benefits the professional elite sport and the community.

For any investor to put money into rugby, there needs to be clarity about the proposition, and right now there does not seem to be that clarity. With three premiership sides already lost to administration and widespread concerns about the viability of the championship, there are deep concerns about the future of professional rugby in England. To attract new funding, investors in rugby need clarity over the future league structure after a period of turmoil, and that clarity is needed as soon as possible to attract the long-term investment that the game needs. What can the Minister do to ensure that we get that clarity as quickly as possible?

I know that the Minister will say that it is not his job to run the sport and that the RFU and Premiership Rugby Ltd between them have that responsibility, but they need to move swiftly to provide much-needed clarity to show how investors can bring teams into professional rugby and make it sustainable, and to ensure that there is a footprint for professional rugby union across all areas of the country where it has support. In Worcester, there are thousands of supporters—between the Warriors and Wasps, there are tens of thousands of supporters—who want to be able to support and follow the professional game. The game cannot afford to lose them. If the RFU does not act fast to provide a route that enables those supporters to get their game back and their teams back to the top flight, I do not believe that Ministers can stand back.

When I was approached by Worcester City Council with the proposal of adding rugby union to the fan-led review of football, I rejected that proposition, because I believe that the two sports are fundamentally different and face different challenges. The challenge facing top-flight football has too often been too much money and the distance that creates between management and fans. The challenge facing rugby union has been too little money and unsustainable finances. The game of rugby union would benefit from its own fan-led review, and having discussed that with my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston), the Minister’s predecessor, I know that he has come to the conclusion that that needs to be explored.

The Minister has already given a great deal of time and effort to addressing the future of rugby union in general and the situation of the Warriors in particular. I have been pestering him over a long time on this issue. I have no need to remind him of his commitment to try to ensure that there is a positive outcome for the rugby offering in Worcester, and of my commitment as MP for Worcester and a personal friend of the Duckworth family to secure the remarkable legacy of elite professional rugby that Cecil Duckworth left the city.

I hope the Minister can use his influence with the Rugby Football Union to make clear to it that the current situation is not tolerable. The loss of much-loved, well-supported local sides and the jobs, investment and pride they bring to a community, as well as the inspiration and opportunities they offer to young people, cannot just be treated as par for the course. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the RFU and Premiership Rugby Ltd need to work with investors to ensure a future for the Warriors and for professional rugby in the west midlands.

When we debated this situation almost a year ago, it seemed that administration was a route to keeping the club and its assets together, attracting new investment and supporting a return to the top flight. Today, there is a real risk that there will be no top-flight team in Worcester or anywhere in the west midlands for many years to come. After millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been invested to support the sustainability of the sport, and all the many community benefits that it brings, that would not be an acceptable outcome.

Public Access to Nature

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), and I congratulate her on securing this very important debate. I want to focus most of my remarks on the importance of access to nature for children and for education. The hon. Lady and I have worked together on campaigns on these issues. However, I also want to touch on some local matters relating to developments in Worcestershire and Herefordshire to do with how we ensure that the children in all our schools benefit from the fantastic countryside and the fantastic nature around us, and how we protect those special places.

Last Saturday, I was on a sponsored walk for my local hospice up in the beautiful Malvern hills. It is a historical place for conservation, and the work of the Malvern Hills Conservators to protect the landscape of the area goes back over a century. We can see three counties from up there, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). We cannot quite see Gloucester, but we can certainly see Gloucestershire, as well as Herefordshire and Worcestershire. It is an incredibly valuable landscape, and it was great to see, as we went on with our miles of walking, that scouts and guides were up on the hills and enjoying them as well. I pay tribute to all the voluntary organisations that provide access to nature for children of school age, including of course the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, and the very important work that they do in getting kids out into the natural environment.

It was very interesting during my time as schools Minister to visit schools in the inner cities of London and Birmingham that were doing really important work, recognising the benefits of nature for the mental health of pupils, in trying to connect their pupils with nature. I remember one visit to a school in a very built-up area of Lambeth, where the teachers had determined to use the resources they had available to develop a garden, create a natural environment and have a pond in the small urban space they had, so that children could engage with nature. They talked about the mental health benefits of that. When we face such a huge mental health challenge in our schools and in our education system, I think we should see access to nature and engagement with nature as one of the solutions. It is certainly not the case that only schools in the countryside can deliver that—schools in urban environments can deliver that, too—but it needs to be something that we consider as part of our curriculum.

[Wera Hobhouse]

The hon. Member makes a great case for young people needing to have access to nature, but because there is so little directly accessible in their local area, they often have to travel a very long way. Does it not make sense to open up more nature, so that people do not have to travel, but have it on their doorstep?

[Mr Walker]

I absolutely recognise that, which is why it is important that councils work together with voluntary groups to make sure that we signpost those green spaces. In my own consistency, which is an urban constituency— Worcester is surrounded by beautiful countryside, I accept —we have seen a fantastic local project by the Worcester Environmental Group and the council to develop the Wild about Worcester Way, a walking route around the city. It connects green spaces in the city and accessible areas such as the Worcester Woods country park, Nunnery wood and Perry wood, where Cromwell allegedly met the devil, to our primary schools, so that there are walking routes for children to enjoy. In areas where they might not enjoy great parks and facilities, to link schools, through active travel, to such places is important.

We also need to look at routes through the countryside. I do not represent many farmers and I am not going to get into the detail of the debate about the right to roam, but I do think we should be exploring more greenways—more long-distance travel routes from area to area. I am interested in proposals for a Hereford to Worcester greenway to enable both active travel and engagement with nature for people. For that to work, there needs to be join-up between different Departments—the Department for Transport, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—to make sure we have an approach that can support these things with proper funding.

I touched on this earlier, but there is also the importance of having nature as part of the curriculum. I have spoken before about the amazing work being done by the Rivers multi-academy trust in my constituency, which is promoting a curriculum based on the sustainable development goals. Right at the heart of that curriculum is engaging children with nature and making sure that they understand their responsibilities to nature. I was interested in what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said about the balance of rights and responsibilities when it comes to access. It is absolutely key that children have the opportunity to learn those responsibilities at an early stage in their education, and they are not going to do that unless we connect them with nature and give them those opportunities to be outside and to be engaged with nature.

[Caroline Lucas]

As someone who spent the first 18 years of their life in Great Malvern and spent a lot of time on the Malvern hills, I appreciate the hon. Member’s words about that. I have been enjoying his speech very much, but is he going to come on to the natural history GCSE? We have worked together with the wonderful Mary Colwell to try to make sure there is a natural history GCSE in the curriculum, which would absolutely give young people that empirical exposure to the nature around them.

[Mr Walker]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right and pre-empts my very next point. I did have very interesting meetings with the hon. Lady, Mary Colwell and Tim Oates discussing the case for a natural history GCSE. I have to honest and say that I was initially sceptical. Going into those meetings, I had extensive briefing from officials as to all the questions to ask and all the reasons why we might not approve a natural history GCSE, and I felt that the campaigners, collectively, were able to answer those questions in an incisive way. That demonstrated the academic benefits of restoring subjects such as botany to the curriculum, and the opportunity to engage students at a crucial time and to make sure that we fill the gap between the primary science curriculum, which includes good elements of nature, and the A-level in environmental studies, which the Government have put forward. The conversations I have had in schools since taking the decision that we should go ahead and develop that, show there is enormous appetite for it. I will be writing to the Minister for Schools to urge him to come forward with the detail needed to ensure that the natural history GCSE can be delivered at the earliest possible opportunity. It is important that we move forward with that. I know that many groups, including The Wildlife Trusts, are interested in contributing to the work on that. I think it is possible to deliver an academically rigorous, challenging and interesting natural history GCSE, which will also widen opportunities for students in our schools to undertake field work.

It is so important to have a natural history GCSE. People say, “Well field work is covered in biology and geography”, but not every student takes those subjects. Many students will opt out of geography before they choose their GCSE courses, and many will take combined sciences and might not have the opportunity to take part in field trips. A natural history GCSE will give students another opportunity to engage in field trips and outdoor activity, and to develop some of the skills that we as a country will need if we are to meet our long-term ambition of leaving nature in a better state than we found it.

We have recently seen in Worcester the establishment of the Office for Environmental Protection. It has been interesting talking to it about the job and skills opportunities there are for people who can understand and monitor levels of nature, biodiversity and environmental issues. Some hard skills are required for that, such as data science and scientific knowledge, so we must ensure that we take advantage of those opportunities. We must look at careers guidance in schools and prepare children for a greener, more environmentally aware future, in which increasing the quality of our natural environment and biodiversity is a key goal shared by all parties across the House. That is also a good reason for stepping forward with access to nature for schoolchildren in general, and with the natural history GCSE in particular.

A couple of things have improved in recent months and years, one of which is the conversation around environmental land management schemes. I have met my local wildlife trust regularly, and our discussions have led me to think that the Department is now in a much better place on ELMs than it perhaps has been sometimes in the past. Some of the concerns that the trust raised strenuously regarding the direction of travel about a year ago seem to have been met, so I am grateful to Ministers for their ongoing engagement with The Wildlife Trusts on that.

A number of constituents have written to me recently about the so-called Save the Shire campaign and the interesting challenge of saving literary landscapes. When that first came in, I imagined that it might refer to the view from the Malvern Hills, which I have always understood was very much the inspiration for Tolkien’s Shire. It turns out, however, that it is to do with another part of Worcestershire, which the Tolkien family had connections with, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean). It is an example of some of the tensions between access to nature and other environmental issues, because it is a campaign against the development of a solar farm. People are saying that they do not want the development of the solar farm because it will change the nature of the countryside and change access. that is a challenge. I will not wade into the planning area. Of course it is important that we protect our rural landscapes, and it is also important that we develop renewable technologies and renewables, but access must be a key part of that and one concern is that, if we have large renewable installations on land, they will restrict access. We should ensure that we enable access, both for nature and creatures, but also for people, to those sites and that we do not allow rights of way, which are important, to be shut off.

We need to continue to work on this area. Some of the figures on the health benefits have been cited. I suspect those understate the reality. The £2 billion figure I have seen in a Natural England report about health benefits largely focuses on physical health. As a country we face such huge challenges with mental health, particularly among our young people. Engaging people with nature and ensuring that they have that opportunity to reflect and engage with nature—as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion ably pointed out, that has very much been part of our natural development as human beings over the millennia, let alone the centuries—will be better for people’s mental health and in the long run it can save the health system a fortune.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachael Maskell]

I absolutely agree. The historic injustice in who owns our land across our country has to be addressed. We have much work to do on that. The environmental improvement plan does not address those issues, which must be addressed, so that everybody can have access to our natural environment.

The plan also lacks ambition when it comes to addressing inequality. The word “inequality” is not sewn through the plan and it must be. Inequality is why we are standing here today, whether that involves the historic injustice of who owns the land in Britain, or the diversity of our communities, where access is far more restricted for those from the most deprived communities—something I recognise within my constituency. Just 8% of England is covered by the right to roam, and 3% of our rivers and 15% of our woods.

We are indebted to Chris Smith, and the work he did in bringing in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to open up access to mountains, moors, heaths, downlands and common land. However, even after those efforts, most of our country locks us out. We need a fresh start and I believe my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) will have that ambition when a Labour Government come in. Even in York, with our incredible bioeconomy, pathways are still closed to the public as developers buy up land and lock them out. We need to address that injustice too.

I personally have known the enrichment that access to nature gives. It is my place to go for restoration. It is a privilege to walk many national trails, over hills and mountains, to be lost in complete wilderness when finding myself, and to cycle the breadth of the country. Even in my constituency, each day, I seek to have a brisk walk to enjoy the rivers and strays, and the environment that comes into the heart of York. I always say that the most important skills I ever learnt were to ride a bike and use a map and compass, yet many of our young people today have no access to either. It is so important that young people learn those vital skills as part of their formal education process. Many youth organisations such as the Brownies, Guides, Scouts and Cubs teach those skills, but every child should have that enrichment.

I will never forget talking to a teacher at Carr Junior School in Acomb in my constituency, who talked about how the children in her school had never seen crashing waves at the seaside and never felt the “sand between their toes”. We have incredible assets across our country, but our children cannot necessarily access them unless their schools have proper funding to afford those trips, or unless we have a strategy that really focuses on young people getting that love of nature.

[Mr Walker]

I agree with the hon. Lady’s point. One visit that I did during my time as Schools Minister was to a primary school in Hastings and Rye, which was all of a mile and a half from the sea—admittedly up quite a high cliff—and I was struck by the headteacher saying that probably two thirds of the children there had never been to the seaside. That is an extraordinary example of how, even with very small distances, communities sometimes get locked in and do not have that opportunity to go and enjoy the natural resources right on their doorstep. It is crucial that schools are resourced but also challenged to provide that engagement with those natural resources, which might be close by but are still considered inaccessible.

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point and could not agree more. It often comes down to funding in schools and being able to afford those opportunities for young people to experience the natural environment. That should not be the case, because we know how that further bakes in inequality. Of course, at a time when children really need to access nature, they are denied it. We have such incredible assets all around us, so we need to provide that opportunity to young people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 17th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I am very proud of the fact that this Government have given record numbers of people the opportunity to have jobs and employment, which is the surest route out of poverty. I believe that up to 3.6 million new jobs have been created under this Government.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is truly excellent news to see England rising up the international league tables for reading to become the highest performing country in the western world. That is testament to the hard work of our teachers and the dedication of the Minister for Schools, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), to following evidence-based policy, but this progress will only be sustained if children are in school regularly and able to learn. Can I strongly commend to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Government the ten-minute rule Bill presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond)? It has cross-party support and delivers on key recommendations of the Education Committee and the Children’s Commissioner. The Government should adopt it as soon as possible.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight those brilliant figures, which show that we have now jumped to fourth best in the world for reading. I certainly see this in schools; it is much more demanding than it was in my day, and that is a tribute to the ministerial team who have done a fabulous job. I will of course examine the details of the ten-minute rule Bill to which he refers.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) made her contribution to the debate by talking about inflation. I agree with some of the contributions I have heard, but just as important as the fact that we have avoided a technical recession is that inflation figures are forecast to come down very sharply. That is hugely important and it is right that the Government have helped households with the cost of living, including the £94 billion package set out in the Budget, which is not to be sniffed at. I particularly welcome the announcement on prepayment meters. I congratulate the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) on her campaign. It is an important issue of social justice and many of us have been raising concerns about prepayment meters over a long period of time, so I congratulate her on her success in that regard.

The main thing I want to say, as Chairman of the Education Committee, is thank you to the Chancellor for listening to the concerns raised by colleagues on both sides of the House about the affordability of childcare. I pay tribute to the Members who have raised this issue consistently: the hon. Members for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips); the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats; my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie); my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom); my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson); my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris); and my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds). All have spoken up about the need to reform childcare and the need to properly fund the so-called free—more correctly, subsidised —hours of childcare that we provide.

There are some really welcome decisions in the Budget that go further on this issue. The first is the decision to invest. I spoke recently in the estimates day debate on the Department for Education. I described investing in childcare in the early years as a win to the power of four. The decision that the Chancellor has taken to invest in childcare in the early years is, after defence, the next big spending commitment in the Budget. I welcome both key investments for the long run.

I welcome the idea of extending the 30 hours offer to one and two-year-olds. The gap that exists between the end of parental leave and the beginning of support has been pointed out by many Members on both sides of the House. That gap has been made significantly smaller by the Government’s introduction of the 30 hours for three and four-year-olds. It has been made significantly better for a small group of people by the offer for disadvantaged two-year-olds. Widening the offer to cover 30 hours for one, two, three and four-year-olds could be game changing, but only if we ensure the sector is properly funded. In that respect, I welcome the fact that, as part of today’s announcement, the Government have announced a step up in the funding for the existing allowances: £204 million next year, increasing to £288 million the year after.

However, the Select Committee has heard concerns about the very real cost pressures that the sector faces right now. Those include substantial increases in business rates—a real problem affecting the voluntary and independent sector, which is such a key part of the childcare sector. I join the calls from the Opposition and Government Benches for further consideration of business rates reform. Another concern I have about the childcare announcements is the ratios. The Select Committee has heard clearly from the sector that if the change is voluntary, not many will take it up, and they certainly do not hear from parents that they want it. However, I welcome the fact that the Government have listened to the consultation and have at least made it optional.

I listened carefully to the arguments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena) about family taxation. There is great sympathy on the Select Committee for going further to provide genuine tax-free childcare, and I hope that we will be able to pick that up as we move forward with our inquiry. I very much welcome the emphasis on expanding the provision of childminding and the reforms to universal credit, which can make a substantial contribution in this space. Again, that is going with the grain of the sector, but we need to ensure that we have sustainable funding for both maintained and voluntary and independent nurseries.

Investing in childcare and early years is the right thing to do, but there are other pressures within the Department for Education’s remit. We heard from the IFS that, under a Conservative Government, investment in the early years has grown faster than in almost any other area of education spending, but its summary of education spending over the last decade also stated that the post-16 further education provision—what my predecessor as Select Committee chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), often describes as a “Cinderella sector”—is one of the most tightly squeezed. As we move forward from the Budget towards the autumn statement, I hope that the Treasury will look carefully at the need for more investment in that sector. Although I welcome the £2.3 billion extra for schools from the spending review, they still face a real squeeze from the combination of inflationary pressures and pay rises for teaching and non-teaching staff.

I welcome smaller Budget announcements, such as the £3 million for supported internships. Buried away in the Red Book and not in the Chancellor’s speech was £11.5 million for Ukrainians to access language programmes. That is welcome, and I know from my time at the DFE that the provision of English for speakers of other languages could be variable. Any extra money spent on supporting Ukrainian families in all our constituencies will be well-spent.

I welcome the extra support for children in care and the amazing people who support them. I hope that the Government will look carefully at extending that further, particularly when it comes to kinship carers. I listened with interest to what my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) said about attendance allowance for grandparents.

I want to pick on the action taken on pensions to help keep doctors in the NHS, which is extremely welcome and important. That will also help to improve retention of headteachers. In addition to action to keep and retain doctors, we need more places in medical schools. This morning I met the Hospitals Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), along with MPs from across Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire to press the case for funded places at the Three Counties Medical School in my constituency. That will make a real difference. I heard the Chancellor mention his long-term NHS workforce plan, and I am glad that it will be announced shortly. I will keep pushing for the fact that funded places at the Three Counties Medical School in Worcester need to be part of that.