Catherine McKinnell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 28 Apr 2025 · Pupil Referral Units · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and it is one that we are looking at as a Department. Obviously, home-to-school transport is an important aspect of accessing education, but it needs to be safe for all children. I would be more than happy to discuss the issue further with him.

• 10 Mar 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The Department’s home-to-school travel policy aims to ensure that no child is prevented from accessing education due to a lack of transport. I am keen to understand how well home-to-school transport is supporting children to access educational opportunity. I am working closely with officials on that, and I will bear my hon. Friend’s comments and concerns in mind as that work continues.

• 25 Feb 2025 · SEND Education Support · Hansard source

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  I appreciate what my hon. Friend says. I am happy to take interventions, but I have to cover a lot of issues that hon. Members have raised. I hope that, in the time we have left, I have the opportunity to do so. I know we all agree that every child deserves the opportunity to achieve, thrive and succeed. Where possible, as highlighted by a number of hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns), that should be within a mainstream setting with their friends. However, we are aware that there are significant challenges currently in achieving that. That is why we are prioritising early intervention, which a number of hon. Members have raised, and inclusive provision within mainstream settings. We know that providing early intervention prevents unmet needs from escalating and supports children to achieve their goals and thrive alongside their peers. We are really committed to working to deliver that for every child in every community. We are doing so by increasing high needs funding by £1 billion, which brings the total funding to £11.9 billion. Suffolk county council is allocated £124 million through the high needs funding block. That is an increase of £10.3 million and a 9% increase per head for two to 18-year-olds. We know that the high needs funding formula needs to be looked at. It has been largely unchanged because we needed to prioritise making sure that we create a fair funding system, and direct funding to where it is needed and can make the biggest impact. That is why we are allocating funding towards capital to ensure that we have places available where they are needed. The £740 million of high needs capital can be used by local authorities—we will announce the allocations in due course—to deliver new places within mainstream settings, special schools and other specialist settings, and to improve the suitability and accessibility of current buildings. It will also help to tackle the issue of transport, which many hon. Members have raised. If we have mainstream availability of specialist support within a local community, there will be no need to travel such distances.

• 27 Jan 2025 · SEND Provision · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the challenges and pressures on the budget. I have identified the need to improve the situation with school transport by educating children locally and to provide more inclusive mainstream places. Where special school places are required, we need to ensure they are in the right place and available for the children who need them. I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to hear the ideas of his friends.

• 27 Jan 2025 · SEND Provision · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right to refer to the worrying findings of the Public Accounts Committee on the situation we are in. As she rightly identifies, it is our ambition that all children receive the right support to succeed, where possible within mainstream schools. That will need education, health and care plans to be processed more effectively, but also for mainstream schools in and of themselves to be supported to become inclusive, so that children and their families are not left waiting. That will help to reduce the cost of transport, because far too many children are being transported to other local authorities over great distance and time, as they cannot be educated locally. All these measures will not only drive down the challenges for families, but get much better outcomes for the money being spent.

• 27 Jan 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady raises a really important point. No child should struggle to get to school because of a lack of transport, and no child should have to travel great distances if there could be an inclusive and appropriate place for them at their local mainstream school. That is what we are determined to deliver for all children, both to ensure that they get the best opportunities and for their families.

• 12 Nov 2024 · School Transport: Northumberland · Hansard source

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  All those details are being worked through and will be announced in due course. I appreciate the hon. Member’s keenness to have advance sight of the statement—it is coming, and it will set out all of the detail. In addition, local government in England is expected to receive about £1.1 billion of new funding in 2025-26 through the implementation of the extended producer responsibility for packaging scheme. Hon. Members might wonder what that has to do with transport, but it will shift the burden for managing household packaging waste from local authorities to the producers who supply and import the packaging. That will create additional revenue for local authorities to channel towards vital services such as public transport. The Government are committed to reforming public services and the local government funding system, while providing as much certainty as possible. It is important that we deliver that reform in partnership with local government, and my ministerial colleagues will be setting out more detail shortly. The Department routinely collects data on local authorities’ expenditure on home-to-school travel, and we understand the increasing financial pressures that they face. However, as things stand, the Government have not collected data on the actual travel being arranged, even fundamental information such as the number of pupils receiving free home-to-school travel, the transporting of siblings—as my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham highlighted—and information on catchment areas. I am determined, given the concerns that he and other hon. Members have raised, that we improve our data on the subject so that local authorities can benchmark themselves against similar authorities and learn from one another, and so that central and local government have the robust evidence to inform decision making on those issues. We will be writing to local authorities in the coming days, setting out our plans to ask them to provide data on travel that they arrange for children and young people to get to school and post-16 providers. It will be voluntary at first, but I hope local authorities will see the benefit of the data collection and share the requested data that they hold. Another big issue that we know we must tackle is school absence. If children are not in school, they cannot benefit from their education. Thanks to the efforts of the sector, more children are in school in 2023-24 compared with the previous year, but 1.6 million children are still persistently absent, and that is a major challenge. We know that some children, particularly those with additional needs, face additional barriers to attendance, so we have to work to tackle those issues. We know that schools need to take a support-first approach and ensure that they have an attendance champion and policy and that they work with local authorities. Clearly, transport to school is a big part of that jigsaw. Public transport clearly has an important role to play. Good local bus services are an essential part of thriving communities, providing access to education and other services. Outside of London, buses were deregulated in 1985. They now largely run on a commercial basis, and my hon. Friend the Member for North Northumberland pointed out some of the challenges that that can present. The Government have pledged to fix that, and the Bus Services Bill announced in the King’s Speech will put the power of local buses into the hands of local leaders. I know the North East Mayor Kim McGuinness is working to improve bus routes and has committed to repairing our broken bus system in the north-east. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham again for bringing the matter forward and all those who have made contributions to the debate. It is an issue that many people rightly feel passionately about. I acknowledge the challenges that far too many families face when seeking to get the right support for their children. By fixing our broken SEND system, by transforming our education system so that more children can access an inclusive, high-quality education locally and by fixing our broken transport system, we can truly make this change.

• 4 Nov 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  We are committed to removing barriers to opportunity for every child. No child should struggle to access education because of a lack of transport. We are keen to understand how well the transport system is working for children accessing schooling, and I will happily meet my hon. Friend to discuss it further.

• 31 Oct 2024 · SEND Provision: Hampshire · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. That should happen at the earliest possible point, because we know—I have mentioned this already—that children’s earliest years make the biggest difference to their life chances, and high-quality early years education can lead to much better outcomes for all children. Arrangements are in place to support early years providers and access to early education, including disability access funding and special educational needs inclusion funding, but he is absolutely right to highlight the ways in which we can help children and families to access support. If we do that at the earliest possible stage in a child’s life, we will be able to improve children’s outcomes and families’ experiences. We want more children and young people to receive the support that they need to thrive in their local mainstream setting, which reduces the need for them to travel a long way to access a specialist placement. Many mainstream settings are going above and beyond to deliver specialist provision locally through resourced provision and special educational needs units. We know that there will always be a place in the system for special schools and colleges for children and young people with the most complex needs, so the Department supports local authorities to provide those places for children and young people through annual high-needs capital funding, which can be used to deliver new places in mainstream and special schools as well as in other specialist settings. It can also be used to improve the suitability and accessibility of existing buildings, and we will set out plans for future high-needs capital funding in due course. The Government are committed to working with councils, school leaders and other sector partners nationally and in Hampshire to develop and improve inclusive education in the mainstream setting. The hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) raised concerns about transport. No child should struggle to get to school because of a lack of transport. Local authorities are obliged to arrange free travel for children of compulsory school age who attend their nearest school and cannot walk there because of the distance; because of a special educational need, disability or mobility problem; or because the route is not safe. There are additional rights to free travel for low-income households to help them exercise school choice, but we know how challenging home-to-school travel is for local authorities at the moment, in large part due to the pressures on the SEND system. In our manifesto, we committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools, which will mean that fewer children have to travel long distances to a school that can meet their needs. It will also reduce the pressure on home-to-school travel. I am keen to understand how well the school travel policy is working to support children to access educational opportunities, and I will continue to work with officials in the Department and across Government to improve the situation, because transport is a cross-Government challenge. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke again for bringing this matter forward and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. We all care passionately about SEND outcomes in Hampshire and across the country.

• 24 Oct 2024 · Special Educational Needs and Disabilities · Hansard source

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  Transport to school is the responsibility of the local authority, and families need to work with their local authorities to ensure that they are not disadvantaged in getting their children to school by transport. I appreciate that that is a challenge— our transport system, too, is in crisis after 14 years of Conservative Government—but we will continue to work across Government to ensure that all our public services meet the needs of families. In the interim, my hon. Friend’s constituents should work with the local authority to ensure that they get the transport they require for their children’s educational needs.

• 24 Oct 2024 · Special Educational Needs and Disabilities · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to identify the current significant transport requirement to meet the needs of children. Obviously, the way that we wish to address that is to ensure that there is inclusive mainstream education available in every community for every child, and we are working at pace to achieve that. The special school is under review and we will report back as soon as possible.

• 3 Sept 2024 · Ofsted · Hansard source

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  The shadow Secretary of State was a Minister in the Department for Education, and he knows these issues well. He also knows that the work we are announcing today is about clearing up the mess that the previous Government left. The Big Listen was announced under his Government, and his former colleague, the previous Chair of the Education Committee, was persuaded of the case for reform of the single-headline grades. Labour is a party of high and rising standards for all our children in all our schools. Reforming inspection to enable improvement in our schools is urgent. Inspection and accountability are crucial tools for achieving better outcomes for all our children. We will take no lessons from a party under whose watch one in four children left primary school without meeting the standards expected in maths and reading. One in five children are persistently absent from school, and it is not good enough. We are determined to fix it, and the announcement that we have made is the first step on that road.