Asked by: Feryal Clark (Labour - Enfield North)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to help tackle arson in (a) Enfield North Constituency, (b) the London Borough of Enfield and (c) London.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Since 2019, the Home Office has provided over £43m of funding for a London Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) (including £9.5m this year) which is providing a multi-agency, preventative response designed to tackle the drivers of serious violence and knife crime. In addition, we have invested over £60m (including c.£8.9m this year) in ‘hotspot policing’ to boost the policing response to serious violence in London and provide high-visibility police patrols and problem-solving tactics in the streets and neighbourhoods most affected.
VRUs are tasked with investing in evidence-based approaches designed to steer vulnerable young people away from involvement in violence. As part of this approach, the London VRU is funding local interventions in Enfield including an outreach and detached youth team which delivers after school activities and creative sessions, 1-1 holistic support for young people, mentoring sessions and sports sessions for children and young people. Alongside this, the policing hot spot response programme is targeting key locations in Enfield Town and Fore Street. In addition to additional visible police patrols, policing interventions delivered through this programme in Enfield have included work to prevent robberies of school pupils and work to target males who were assaulting sex workers.
The government is also taking forward a programme of national activity to drive down knife crime. This includes recent consultation on new legislative proposals, including a ban of zombie-style knives and machetes. The government response was published on 30 August 2023. Following careful consideration of the responses to the consultation, a Statutory Instrument was laid in Parliament on 25 January 2024. Once the legislation has been approved by Parliament, a surrender scheme will be launched this summer to remove these items from our streets and once this has been completed, the manufacture, supply, sale and possession of zombie-style knives and machetes will be outlawed from 24 September 2024. This will cover face to face and online sales.
Additionally, through the Criminal Justice Bill 2023, which is currently progressing through parliament, we are providing more powers for police to seize knives held in private that they believe will be used for unlawful violence, increasing the maximum penalty for the offences of selling prohibited weapons and selling knives to under 18s and creating a new offence of possessing an article with blade or point or an offensive weapon with intent to commit unlawful violence.
Asked by: Steve McCabe (Labour - Birmingham, Selly Oak)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of employing veterans as mentors in secondary schools to help tackle (a) persistent absenteeism and (b) disruptive behaviour in classrooms.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
The department recognises the valuable skills and experience that former military personnel can bring to the education sector.
The undergraduate veteran teaching bursary provides financial support to eligible veterans who are studying for a degree with qualified teacher status in secondary subjects that are in high demand, such as biology, chemistry, computing, languages, mathematics, or physics. The bursaries are worth £20,000 in each of the last two years of the course and are available to veterans who have left the armed forces within the last five years or are due to leave within the next two years.
Graduate veterans are also eligible to access generous bursaries in priority subjects via postgraduate Initial Teacher Training routes, alongside other graduates.
The department does not have plans, at this stage, to look to employ veterans as mentors to support better behaviour and attendance in school. The department is currently delivering an attendance mentoring pilot which is designed to test and evidence effective practice for improving attendance through individual support and targeted family engagement. The pilot, which is delivered by Barnardo’s, involves mentors supporting a group of persistently absent pupils and their families on a one-to-one basis to help identify and address their barriers to education. The pilot is currently being evaluated to improve the existing evidence base on the effectiveness of this style of attendance intervention. The information from this pilot will then be published to help inform both school and local authority practice.
Asked by: Marquess of Lothian (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is the target size of the Royal Marines; how many Commandos currently serve in the Royal Marines; and what steps they are taking (1) to improve the recruitment of, and (2) to combat the shortfall in the number of serving, Commandos.
Answered by Earl of Minto - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
I can confirm that it is the Government’s intention to announce an indicative projected strength for Regular Armed Forces personnel shortly which will provide further detail on planned future Armed Force strengths. However, I can confirm that as of 1 October 2023, there are currently 6,040 Royal Marines (RM) Commandos. This figure excludes the RM Band Service.
These figures are published on a quarterly basis for all His Majesty’s Armed Forces and can be found at the following website: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-2023.
RM recruitment is benefiting from Defence delivered improvements to the offer including pay and pension reviews, accommodation and recruitment drives and the recruitment bounty scheme. Additionally, specific recruitment activity undertaken directly by the RM include continuing RM outreach and advertising (across traditional and social media), streamlining the recruitment process, increased mentoring at the Commando Training Centre and ensuring development opportunities for Commando instructors.
Asked by: Andrew Rosindell (Conservative - Romford)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he has taken to work with relevant authorities to tackle knife (a) possession and (b) crime among youth in (i) England and (ii) Romford constituency.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Tackling knife crime is a priority and the Government is determined to crack down on the scourge of violence devastating our communities.
We recently consulted on new legislative proposals to tackle knife crime and as a result, in the Criminal Justice Bill, we have introduced provisions to provide more powers for police to seize knives held in private that could be used in crimes, increase the maximum penalty for the offences of selling prohibited weapons and selling knives to under 18s. In the next few weeks, the Government intends to introduce a new ban on zombie-style machetes and knives.
As a result of the Government’s Police Uplift Programme (PUP) the Metropolitan police service has recruited 3,468 additional uplift officers against a total three-year allocation of 4,557 officers. The Metropolitan Police’s funding will be up to £3,581.1 million for 2024/25, an increase of up to £118.9 million when compared to 2023/24.
Under this Government, it has never been easier for the police to make legitimate use of stop and search powers. Every knife seized through stop and search is a potential life saved. In 2022-23, stop and search removed over 15,000 weapons and firearms from our streets and resulted over 74,000 arrests across England and Wales. In Essex there were over 2,000 resultant arrests following a stop and search and almost 4,600 searches resulted in a stolen or prohibited article being found in 2022-23.
The Home Office has invested over £160m since 2019 into the development of 20 Violence Reduction Units across England and Wales with a further £55m made available for 2023/24. Since 2019, we have provided over £43 million to develop and run the London Violence Reduction Unit, which covers Havering. This includes an investment of £9.5m in 2023/24. Violence Reduction Units deter people, particularly young people, from becoming involved in serious violence by bringing together partners from health, probation, policing, housing and beyond and investing in the best evidence-based interventions.
Through our Grip programme, we are providing additional funding to enable the Metropolitan police to boost patrols in specific streets and neighbourhoods most affected by violence, including Romford High Street. This programme is providing regular, visible patrols to deter violence and provide community reassurance as well as problem-oriented policing.
Problem-oriented policing is based on an analytical approach that seeks to identify and respond to the specific drivers of violence as they affect the particular location, so that working with partners, the police can take effective preventative action to tackle these. Since 2019, we have provided The Met Police with c.£51.8 million for their delivery of the programme and have awarded them a further c.£8.9 million for this (23/24) financial year.
Violence Reduction Units, in combination with GRIP, have delivered a statistically significant reduction in hospital admissions for violent injuries since funding began in 2019 (an estimated 3,220 admissions have been prevented in areas where the programmes operate).
Over 10 years the Home Office is investing £200m in early intervention and prevention initiatives to help children and young people at risk of exploitation and involvement in serious violence, through the Youth Endowment Fund.
The YEF have funded the SW!TCH Lives project in Romford, which aimed to promote positive actions and emotions and reduce risky behaviour by providing young people with consistent, positive role models, weekly mentoring and positive peer networks. They have also funded ‘You and Me Counselling’ as part of the COVID-19 Learning Project, which aimed to provide targeted support to young people at risk of being involved in violence; and second, to learn fast about the best ways to reach young people during a period of social distancing.
Asked by: Tracey Crouch (Conservative - Chatham and Aylesford)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to improve PE training for trainee primary school teachers.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
The government does not prescribe the curriculum of initial teacher training (ITT) courses. The ITT Core Content Framework (CCF) sets out a minimum entitlement to training that accredited ITT providers must incorporate into their primary and/or secondary ITT courses. The ITT Core Content Framework does not set out the full ITT curriculum for trainee teachers. It remains for individual providers to design curricula appropriate for the subject, phase and age range that the trainees will be teaching. Providers should ensure their curricula encompass the full entitlement described in the ITT Core Content Framework, as well as integrating additional analysis and critique of theory, research and expert practice as they deem appropriate. The ITT CCF is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-itt-core-content-framework.
The department is continually exploring opportunities to further improve teacher training and professional development, including reviewing the content of the CCF alongside the Early Career Framework. The review is due to be published in early 2024.
Primary schools can use the PE and sport premium to provide staff with professional development, mentoring, training and resources to help them improve the quality of their PE, sport and physical activity provision to all pupils, and to embed physical activity across the school day.
Asked by: Peter Kyle (Labour - Hove)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment he has made of the (a) effectiveness of and (b) adequacy of the levels of industry co-funding for the AI and data science postgraduate conversion course scholarship programme.
Answered by Saqib Bhatti - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The £30 million AI and Data Science Conversion Course programme was established in 2020 to broaden the supply of talent in the UK AI labour market. It funded universities to develop masters level AI or data science courses suitable for non-STEM students and 2,600 scholarships for students from backgrounds underrepresented in the tech industry.
We are already seeing the positive impact the programme is having in addressing the AI skills gap. As of March 2023 6,300 students have enrolled on the programme, almost three times our targets. 73% of scholarships awarded to women, 35% awarded to Black students, and 26% awarded to disabled students. The courses are successfully converting non-STEM students to enter the AI labour market: 88% of employed graduates were in employment directly related to AI or data science, either in the public or private sector.
In 2023 an industry co-funding element was added, whereby industry could support the programme through in-kind support or scholarship funding. As of November 2023, this amounted to over £6.5 million in in-kind support and scholarship funding. The in-kind contributions directly support student employability and includes co-design and delivery of course content to ensure students gain skills to meet sector need; providing access to software and applications to support learning and skills development; and opportunities to engage with industry through employer-led talks and workshops, industry mentoring support, and provision of work-based projects and placements.
Asked by: Stephen Morgan (Labour - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of trends in the level of persistent school absence rates in the last 12 months.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
Persistent absence is a post-pandemic challenge which is affecting schools around the world. With the standards of schools continuing to rise, the benefits of this success can only be felt when all children are in school.
The department knows that persistent absence is often a symptom of other problems. Progress has already been made with 380,000 fewer children persistently absent or not attending in the 2022/23 academic year than in 2021/22. The department’s comprehensive strategy to improve attendance continues to tackle this attendance challenge.
The department has published new, stronger guidance setting out the expectations for schools, academy trusts and local authorities to work together to improve attendance. To make it easier for schools and local authorities to identify pupils at risk of becoming persistently absence, a new attendance data tool to has also been piloted with 88% of state-funded schools currently involved.
This year, the department will introduce 18 new attendance hubs, bringing the total to 32 and 2,000 schools supported to tackle persistent absence. Attendance hubs involve several leading schools sharing practical solutions with others to break down barriers to attendance. From direct pupil engagement initiatives, like breakfast clubs and extracurricular activities, to improving other schools’ processes and analysis, these hubs are already making a real difference, with more than one million pupils being supported into regular education.
The department is also expanding the three-year mentoring programme to tackle absenteeism. Backed by an additional investment of £15 million, this programme provides direct intensive one-to-one support to 10,000 persistent and severely absent pupils and their families. From September 2024, attendance mentors will work in a further ten areas. These areas are in addition to the existing pilot programme with Barnardo’s, which is already operating in Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Knowsley, Salford, and Stoke on Trent.
Ten newly appointed expert attendance advisers have also played an important role in supporting local authorities and a number of multi-academy trusts with higher levels of persistent absence to review their current practice and develops plans to improve.
Alongside these measures, the department is investing:
Asked by: Stephen Morgan (Labour - Portsmouth South)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help tackle persistent school absences.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
Persistent absence is a post-pandemic challenge which is affecting schools around the world. With the standards of schools continuing to rise, the benefits of this success can only be felt when all children are in school.
The department knows that persistent absence is often a symptom of other problems. Progress has already been made with 380,000 fewer children persistently absent or not attending in the 2022/23 academic year than in 2021/22. The department’s comprehensive strategy to improve attendance continues to tackle this attendance challenge.
The department has published new, stronger guidance setting out the expectations for schools, academy trusts and local authorities to work together to improve attendance. To make it easier for schools and local authorities to identify pupils at risk of becoming persistently absence, a new attendance data tool to has also been piloted with 88% of state-funded schools currently involved.
This year, the department will introduce 18 new attendance hubs, bringing the total to 32 and 2,000 schools supported to tackle persistent absence. Attendance hubs involve several leading schools sharing practical solutions with others to break down barriers to attendance. From direct pupil engagement initiatives, like breakfast clubs and extracurricular activities, to improving other schools’ processes and analysis, these hubs are already making a real difference, with more than one million pupils being supported into regular education.
The department is also expanding the three-year mentoring programme to tackle absenteeism. Backed by an additional investment of £15 million, this programme provides direct intensive one-to-one support to 10,000 persistent and severely absent pupils and their families. From September 2024, attendance mentors will work in a further ten areas. These areas are in addition to the existing pilot programme with Barnardo’s, which is already operating in Middlesbrough, Doncaster, Knowsley, Salford, and Stoke on Trent.
Ten newly appointed expert attendance advisers have also played an important role in supporting local authorities and a number of multi-academy trusts with higher levels of persistent absence to review their current practice and develops plans to improve.
Alongside these measures, the department is investing:
Asked by: Lord Weir of Ballyholme (Democratic Unionist Party - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to combat increasing levels of pupil truancy in schools.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Improving attendance remains a top priority for the department as regular school attendance is important for children’s educational progress, for their wellbeing, their safeguarding and for their wider development. Truancy is subset of absence; the largest cause of persistent absence is sickness.
In 2022, the department published stronger expectations of schools, trusts, governing bodies and local authorities in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance. This guidance is available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1099677/Working_together_to_improve_school_attendance.pdf.
The department now expects all schools to appoint a champion, and for local authorities and schools to agree individual plans for persistently absent children. In January 2024, the department launched 18 new attendance hubs, bringing the total to 32, which will see nearly 2,000 schools helped to tackle persistent absence across the country. These hubs will support schools responsible for the attendance of over a million pupils.
At the same time the department also announced an extra £15 million to expand one-to-one attendance mentoring over the next three years, to help 10,000 children struggling to attend school. To help identify children at risk of persistent absence and to enable early intervention, the department has established a timelier flow of pupil level attendance data through the daily attendance data collection. 88% of state funded schools are now signed up to this.
Across all phases, around 380,000 fewer pupils were persistently absent or not attending in 2022/23 than in 2021/22. Daily data for 2022/23 shows school absence of 9.3% in secondary schools, down from 10.0% absent or not attending school for covid related reasons in 2021/22. Further absence data from the school census is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england.
Asked by: Maria Eagle (Labour - Garston and Halewood)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many UK personnel have served in UN peacekeeping missions in each year since 2019.
Answered by James Heappey
Since 2019, the UK has contributed to the following UN Peacekeeping missions: MINUSMA (Mali), MONUSCO(DRC), UNFICYP(Cyprus), UNIFIL(Lebanon), UNMISS (South Sudan), UNSMIL(Libya), UNSOM(Somalia).
The total number of UK personnel who have served on these missions in each year since 2019 is outlined below.
2019: 2,284
2020: 1,115
2021: 1,844
2022: 1,978
2023: 1,211
The figures provided capture those directly employed on the UN Missions. Where the UK deployed at Unit level and above, the figures also include those who served as part of the National Support Element.
The figures do not include the UK troops training and mentoring partner forces in advance of their deployment on UN operations.