Asked by: Tahir Ali (Labour - Birmingham, Hall Green)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that schools in the Birmingham city local authority area are adequately funded to enable a return to operations five days a week in September 2020.
Answered by Nick Gibb
Our plan is for all pupils, in all year groups, to return to school full-time from the beginning of the autumn term, and on 2 July we published guidance to help schools prepare for this.
This guidance is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak.
Schools have continued to receive their core funding allocations throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. Following last year’s Spending Round, school budgets are rising by £2.6 billion in 2020-21, £4.8 billion in 2021-22 and £7.1 billion in 2022-23, compared to 2019-20. As stated in our guidance, schools should use their existing resources when making arrangements to welcome all children back for the autumn.
Asked by: Tahir Ali (Labour - Birmingham, Hall Green)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on children in social care in (a) Birmingham, Hall Green constituency and (b) the UK.
Answered by Vicky Ford
Ensuring that vulnerable children remain protected is a top priority for the government. The COVID-19 outbreak represents a time of severe pressure across society, which we know presents heightened levels of risk for some children, especially those known to social care.
We have been working closely with local authorities, including Birmingham, to assess the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on vulnerable children and ensure that children are being adequately protected.
Our Regional Education and Care Team (REACT) for the West Midlands is in contact with Birmingham Children’s Trust and Birmingham Council on a regular basis, to understand how they are supporting vulnerable children to attend school and ensure their systems and processes for maintaining contact with vulnerable children are robust. We also collect fortnightly data from local authorities across the country, including Birmingham, around their contact with vulnerable children, workforce availability and other system pressures in order to offer support and challenge where needed.
The government has provided £3.7 billion of additional funding to support local authorities in meeting COVID-19 related pressures, including for looked after children and wider children’s services.
We are continuing to intervene with local authorities that have been found to be failing in their delivery of children’s services and judged inadequate by Ofsted. It remains an absolute priority for the government that children are kept safe. Where they are in place, we have also asked commissioners and advisers to support local authorities, for example, by helping them to manage conflicting priorities and reviewing their contingency plans to ensure they are robust.
Our guidance on supporting vulnerable children and young people during the COVID-19 outbreak can be found at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-for-childrens-social-care-services.