Helen Hayes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Nov 2025 · Gaza: Humanitarian Obligations · Hansard source

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  As I said, I agree that aid should be allowed into Gaza unfettered. That should be administered by the UN and by aid agencies that are well able to determine with Palestinians what supplies are needed. Does the Minister agree that it is unacceptable to deny the children of Gaza their right to education, and that it is vital that a way forward is found for education materials to be allowed into Gaza, along with supplies for psychosocial kits, so that children can begin the long process of recovery? Over the last two years, we have witnessed the destruction of the entire education system in Gaza—97% of all schools have sustained some level of damage. That is happening not only in Gaza, but in the west bank. I have stood in the ruins of two schools destroyed by violent settlers in the west bank. Those attacks have been perpetrated by a UN member state that has not yet signed the safe schools declaration, which has been signed by both the UK and the Palestinian Authority. On the eve of the fifth international conference on the safe schools declaration, which takes place in Nairobi tomorrow and marks 10 years since the declaration’s inception, I call on the Minister to exert pressure on the Israeli Government to join the declaration and commit to refrain from causing further damage to education facilities in Gaza and the west bank. Recovery is a long road, and the ceasefire is fragile. The process must start with the different parties coming together to protect education, to respect the rights of children and to ensure that there is unfettered access for all the supplies needed to sustain that recovery.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Gaza: Humanitarian Obligations · Hansard source

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  I agree with everything that the hon. Member said. It is vital that such badly needed aid is allowed to enter Gaza unrestricted, and that we recognise that that process will need to continue for the foreseeable future because the situation is so desperate and the recovery will be long. But the recovery cannot begin without that unfettered access. There are only 15 health facilities in Gaza able to provide maternity and obstetric care. Mothers are giving birth without anaesthesia or essential drugs. Alongside the healthcare system in Gaza, the education system has also been largely destroyed. Children in Gaza have been traumatised by the conflict. Their psychosocial recovery is a really important part of achieving long-term peace and stability. They also have a right to education. Children in Gaza are desperate to return to school and the UN is working hard to restore education services, but the current ceasefire agreement and 20-point plan are silent on the subject of education, allowing it to be deprioritised. The Israeli Government’s co-ordinator of government activities in the territories states that all school supplies are currently banned from entry to Gaza. UNRWA submitted self-learning materials to COGAT for approval in July 2024. It acknowledges that the question of textbooks and content is controversial, but those supplies have not been approved and all basic materials, including basic stationery supplies, are currently being denied.

• 18 Nov 2025 · Gaza and Sudan · Hansard source

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  The Foreign Secretary spoke in her statement of Israeli restrictions strangling the Palestinian economy. These are not restrictions; they are strategic attempts to undermine the viability of Palestine by illegal settlement, harassment, intimidation, murder and displacement of Palestinians from their land. Illegal settlements are still being fuelled by UK funds through trade in illegal goods and services produced there. That is completely unacceptable. I call on the Foreign Secretary to introduce a full ban on trade in goods from illegal settlements in the west bank, and to extend the sanctions already introduced on organisations like the Israel Land Fund to halt the flow of resources that are making this illegal activity possible.

• 3 Nov 2025 · Care Leavers · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Care leavers need support; they need the state to deliver for them when family is sometimes not there in the way that it is for many young people. Does she agree with me and my Select Committee that we need to iron out the differences in support for care leavers across the country and that we should have a national offer for care leavers so that they can rely on support wherever they are in the country?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  On the work on extra-familial harms, what engagement is the Minister having with colleagues in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government? That very much reflects my perspective as a constituency MP and the heartbreaking cases I have seen in my constituency, where a family needed to move due to an extra-familial harm to a child. The social housing system is unable at the moment to protect the family’s tenancy rights. What happens is that families then move into temporary accommodation, and the whole stability of their life unravels as a consequence. In the previous Parliament, I put forward a proposal under the name Georgia’s law, which was named for one of my constituents who experienced exactly that, with utterly tragic consequences for her family. I wonder whether the Minister might pick that up with colleagues cross-departmentally.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  I thank all hon. Members for contributing to this debate on a Thursday afternoon. For the benefit of anybody watching these proceedings externally, I should say that Thursday afternoons are a challenging time for hon. Members, when many of them have constituency commitments. The debate has therefore been characterised by the quality of the contributions, but not necessarily their quantity. It has been consensual and constructive, and it is important that we have brought the issues affecting some of the most vulnerable children in our country to the attention of the House. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) for sharing his experience of pursuing, at a local level, making care experience a protected characteristic. Important work is going on in many local authorities on that theme, and I look forward to undertaking further work in the Education Committee to look at the evidence coming from local authorities that have implemented that approach of the benefits that it brings. I too pay tribute to Terry Galloway for all of his campaigning work in that area. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), and pay tribute to him for the contribution he makes to the Education Committee. We are lucky to benefit from his experience of senior leadership in his local authority and his lived experience—they are valuable for the work of the Committee. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury), who also spoke powerfully based on his lived experience, and we have benefited from him bringing it to the debate. Finally, I thank the Minister for his response. The Select Committee is pleased to see him in his place, with the depth of experience and commitment that he brings to this area of policy. We look forward to continuing to scrutinise work on it and to seeing some of the announcements he made bear fruit in the lives of children and young people across the country. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Education Committee, Children’s social care, HC 430, and the Government response, HC 1350.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Education Committee, Children’s social care, HC 430, and the Government response, HC 1350. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for granting time for this debate on the Education Committee’s report on children’s social care and the Government’s response. I am particularly pleased that the debate is taking place on the eve of Care Leavers Month, a time of more intensive focus on children’s social care and the support provided to care leavers. The inquiry was launched by our predecessor Committee in December 2023 to take a comprehensive look at the children’s social care system as a whole. It was interrupted by the general election, but the new Committee decided that the work was too important to drop, and agreed to progress the inquiry to a conclusion. In total, the Committee held eight oral evidence sessions. We heard from a range of experts across the sector, and I am particularly pleased that we held an oral evidence session with four care-experienced young people, who spoke powerfully of their experiences of children’s social care and their hopes for reform. Children’s social care comprises a set of vital services that support some of our most vulnerable children. Those services include early help and support for families, safeguarding, the care of looked-after children, support for disabled children, and a range of other services. They encompass some of the gravest responsibilities of the state, yet we know that they are under intense pressure. The erosion of funding, combined with increasing need, has resulted in a situation in which many services are struggling to deliver in a way that is genuinely child-centred. All too often, looked-after children are placed far from home. The outcomes for care-experienced young people are shockingly poor. In 2022, the current Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), who was responsible at the time for the independent review of children’s social care commissioned by the previous Government, said that the system was in need of a total reset. Although the situation is very serious, that is in no way to deny the extraordinarily hard work and commitment we see among those who work to support children in the care system, and I pay tribute to them at the start of the debate. Social workers, support workers, advocates, foster carers, kinship carers and many others step in to support the most vulnerable children and to try to deliver a secure and solid foundation for their childhood. However, our inquiry found that many of the problems highlighted by the independent review of children’s social care persist and, in a significant number of cases, have worsened since the review. Witnesses criticised the piecemeal approach to reform, which has focused on new short-term initiatives in a small number of areas, rather than comprehensive change. There has been a rising need for children’s social care over the past decade. The number of looked-after children has risen by over 20% in the past 10 years, standing at 83,630 in 2024. Over the same period, the rate of looked- after children has increased from 60 to 70 per 10,000 children in the population. The number of section 47 inquiries per year in response to child protection concerns has risen by 57% over the past decade. That rising need has been in direct correlation to the erosion of funding for early help and support services, such as Sure Start, which played such a critical role in preventing families from reaching crisis point. That is leading to a severe shortage of placements for children in care. In 2024, 45% of looked-after children were placed outside their local authority, and 22% were placed over 20 miles from home. The inquiry heard distressing accounts from care-experienced young people who had been placed far from home. One young person had experienced racism for the first time when she was placed in an area with a very different demographic from her home area. Another had had to get up at 4 am and take long-distance trains to school while on a respite placement because her foster family were on holiday. Another had chosen not to pursue higher education, having experienced such frequent moves during her time in care. There is an acute shortage of foster care placements. The need for 6,500 new foster carers in England has left local authorities over-reliant on expensive private children’s home providers, despite evidence of disgraceful profiteering in parts of the sector. We found that some local authorities do much better than others at keeping their looked-after children close to home and avoiding the spot purchasing of expensive and often poor-quality private residential places. Our report recommended that the Department publish a national sufficiency strategy for children’s social care and require all local authorities to develop and publish strategies for reducing the number of out-of-area placements. The Department’s response states: “While we do not believe a national sufficiency strategy would be responsive enough to children’s needs at a local level, we are working closely with the two RCC” —regional care co-operative— “pathfinder areas and supporting improved placement commissioning and forecasting”. I would like to press the Minister on that. The purpose of a national sufficiency strategy would be to give the Government additional leverage in ironing out the significant variation in practice between local authorities. Local authorities should be adopting best practice on the provision of care placements. We know that some do that really well and therefore have very few children who are not in the borough. Without a national strategy, however, it is hard to see how the Government can grip the extent of the variation. In response to the severe shortage of foster carers, we recommended that the Department put in place a national fostering strategy and consult on introducing a national register of foster carers. The Department’s response states that it is “considering the potential costs and benefits of a national register of foster carers”, but it does not commit to a national strategy. For many years now, the only method of foster carer recruitment has been advertising, but that is simply not delivering. The conversion rate is shocking: only 6% of people who express an interest in fostering put in an application to do so, and only 32% of applications are eventually approved. That tells us that we need a more comprehensive approach that seeks not only to drum up interest but to seek proactively to address some of the barriers to fostering, particularly those in relation to housing, and to deliver better support and respite arrangements for foster carers. The inquiry heard about the crucial role played by kinship carers, who step in to look after a child within their network of family or friends when the child’s biological parents are unable to do so. We heard from a young person who described kinship care as “a loving, caring, beautiful environment where I felt nurtured and valued”. Kinship care is often the best arrangement for children whose parents cannot look after them, as it helps them to maintain secure attachments within their family. However, the Committee also heard about the financial struggles faced by kinship carers, including the fact that 67% of children in kinship care live in a deprived household. Kinship carers act out of love, but they should not be forced into poverty for doing so. Our report recommended that the new allowance for kinship carers should be on a par with the allowance for foster carers, and that entitlements to kinship leave should be included in the Government’s review of the parental leave system. The Department’s response states that the parental leave review will look at support for kinship carers, but it does not commit to setting the kinship allowance at the same level as support for foster carers. I press the Minister to look carefully at that. There are much higher costs, both to children and to the public purse, when a kinship arrangement breaks down and a local authority has to fund a foster placement or a children’s home placement for a child. Kinship carers are the unsung heroes of children’s social care, and they need to be properly supported. Our report concluded: “It is unacceptable that the continuation of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund was not announced until 1 April 2025, leaving families and children uncertain about the future of their support.” We recommended that the Department end the annual cliff edge of uncertainty faced by adoptive families and make funding for the adoption and special guardianship support fund permanent. We also expressed our concern about the decision to limit the funding per child within the ASGSF and recommended that the Government keep a very close watch on the impact of that decision and reinstate the previous level of funding rapidly if there are significant adverse effects. The Department’s response confirmed that funding for the adoption and special guardianship support fund has been committed for 2026-27, but it did not commit to making the fund permanent. Our inquiry heard that outcomes for care-experienced young people are far worse on many measures than for their non-care-experienced peers. That is a shocking indication of the failures of the children’s social care system. Some 39% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 are not in education, employment or training, compared with 13% of all young people aged 19 to 21. Only 15% of care leavers go to university by the age of 19, compared with 46% of children who have not been in care. Approximately one in four—perhaps more—of the adult prison population has been in care, and between 30% and 50% of homeless people are estimated to have spent time in care. Our inquiry heard about the financial difficulties faced by young people on leaving care. One young person, Jake Hartley, had to use food banks and borrow money to pay bills after turning 18. Louise Fitt told us that she had to drop A-levels after turning 18 due to the need to work and support herself financially. She said: “I always wanted an education, but I had to sacrifice that because I have to eat, I have to have a roof over my head; that is so important. We should not have to choose between that. We should be allowed to study if we want to… It is not nice being left on your own at 18 to go into the adult world and to figure it out.” The report recommended that the Department for Education develop a national care offer to harmonise support for care leavers across the country. In response, the Department stated that it had launched a new website “which brings together all relevant information in an easily accessible format.” I want to press the Minister on that point. Care leavers should not face a postcode lottery for support. There is simply no justification for that. A website with information about the inconsistent support available in different areas is not the same as a national care offer. My Committee is clear that the Government should commit to a national offer to ensure that no care-experienced young person falls through the cracks and that care-experienced young people can feel confident to move, go to university or take up employment without feeling that their aspirations are constrained by worries about whether they will be supported. Our report also expressed concerns about the Government’s proposal to reduce support through universal credit for those aged under 22 who are care experienced, and recommended that care leavers be exempted. In its response, the Department said that “no decisions have been made yet” and that it would “consider consultation feedback before implementing any changes.” As the Government prepare to consider welfare reforms, I urge the Minister to make the strongest representations to his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury on this issue. It would make a huge difference. We are concerned by the Government’s refusal to commit to a number of our recommendations. We recommended that the Department implement the recommendation of the independent review of children’s social care to develop universal standards of care that apply to all children’s homes, including supported accommodation, ensuring that children in all settings receive care where they live. In its response, the Department stated: “Rather than prioritising development of a single universal set of standards, we are focusing on options for updating some of the most out-dated National Minimum Standards to ensure they reflect the latest ambitious goals we have for children and to bring them into better alignment with more recently developed standards.” I urge the Minister to look again at that recommendation, which would represent greater ambition for the quality of accommodation and support that children receive. The Committee recommended that the Department introduce national eligibility criteria for disabled children’s social care. The Department responded that it was waiting for the Law Commission’s recommendations on disabled children’s social care and would “set out any plans for reform in due course.” Whatever the outcome of the Law Commission’s work, it is vital that the postcode lottery currently experienced by families with a disabled child is addressed. We recommended that the Department take forward the recommendation of the independent review of children’s social care to introduce an opt-out model of independent advocacy for all children in care. In its response, the Department said that it would “introduce new National Standards for Advocacy for Children and Young People and revised statutory guidance on Providing Effective Advocacy for Children and Young People Making a Complaint under the Children Act 1989 in 2025.” I know that this topic is very close to the Minister’s heart. I urge him to go further than the response indicates and look at how access to independent advocacy can be maximised for all children in care. We welcome the Government’s commitment to family group decision making in relation to children on the edge of the care system, but we recommended that the Department clarify the specific model of family group decision making in statutory guidance to ensure that best practice is followed in all local authorities. In response, the Department said: “It is a local authority’s decision on which model of FGDM will best serve the families they support after considering the evidence.” I urge the Minister to look again at producing guidance for local authorities. Family group decision making is a very effective tool for driving better outcomes for children, but only if it is properly understood and rigorously implemented. There are risks in an approach that does not guarantee the quality of this work. Finally, the Committee recommended that the Department put in place a strategy for supporting children and young people at risk of extra-familial harm. The Department emphasised that it had strengthened the multi-agency response to extra-familial harm through updated statutory guidance. I encourage the Minister to pay further attention to this work. Extra-familial harm is a growing cause of children entering the care system, particularly as teenagers, and our evidence points to systems that are not joined up and are often ill-equipped to protect children from threats outside the home. Indeed, our evidence says that removing a child from their home can harm them further, rather than protecting them from the threats they are experiencing that do not come from within their family network. By intervening in the lives of children and families through children’s social care, the state exercises some of its gravest responsibilities. The stakes are very high and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic, but there are also huge rewards if we get things right. More families would be able to thrive together, and more children would be able to overcome adverse childhood experiences and thrive in education. Disabled children would be able to access education and opportunities on an equal footing with their peers. Even more importantly, the effectiveness of this work is fundamental if the Government are to meet some of their other challenges. If the Government are serious about tackling homelessness, or about tackling the intense crisis in the criminal justice system, they must also be serious about the outcomes for children in the care system. This work is of the utmost importance and my Committee supports the Government in their mission to break down the barriers to opportunity and to create a country in which every child can thrive.

• 29 Oct 2025 · International Baccalaureate: Funding in State Schools · Hansard source

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  I think the Government are right to focus on how to improve education for every young person. If the hon. Member will bear with me, I will come on to some wider points about the importance of the IB, and the features of the IB that should be applicable more widely across the education sector. We need to be clear that we are talking about 1% of schools across the country, and that the other 99% of schools and colleges have many deep challenges. The Government are right to turn their attention to them as well. How can the Government ensure that every young person has opportunities for enrichment and opportunities to develop broad transferable skills? Given the shockingly high figure of one in eight young people who are not in education, employment or training, how can the Government ensure that post-16 education is engaging, inspiring and exciting for all young people? Where I take issue with the Government is in relation to the lack of consultation underpinning their decision to redeploy funding within the large programme uplift.

• 29 Oct 2025 · International Baccalaureate: Funding in State Schools · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will elaborate on consultation and engagement in a moment, but I encourage Liberal Democrat Members to reflect on the role that their own Government played in the shockingly deep cuts to 16-to-19 education across the board from 2010, and the implications of those decisions in what the current Government are now trying to tackle. Engagement with schools and colleges on the decision would have been helpful. Given the Government’s objectives for the economy, I understand the focus on STEM subjects and pupils taking four or more A-levels, but STEM subjects are not the only ones with a higher cost base to deliver. Some creative subjects with direct links to employment in the creative industries also carry higher costs, which can exclude students from lower-income backgrounds. In the context of the Government’s objective of ensuring parity of esteem between vocational and technical routes and academic ones, it is possible to imagine how the redeployment of the large programme uplift could have helped to increase quality in vocational and technical courses. Evidence of consideration of a range of options and an understanding of the views of those working in the sector would have been helpful in the context of the decision. The Government’s ambitious programme of education reform will have significant implications for post-16 education. The curriculum and assessment review, the post-16 White Paper, the introduction of V-levels, the youth guarantee and technical excellence colleges will all have potentially profound and positive implications for the opportunities available to young people and the quality of the education they receive.

• 29 Oct 2025 · International Baccalaureate: Funding in State Schools · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important debate. Post-16 education is a vital stage of a young person’s life. Whether they are following an academic, vocational or technical pathway, it is the stage at which they can focus more on the subjects they love, exercise greater choice over their learning, and begin to think more about where they want their education to take them, whether into further or higher education or employment. It is also a stage at which wider enrichment is vital, helping young people to develop broader transferable skills, find their talents, grow in confidence and expand into their growing freedom and independence. However, funding for 16-to-19 education in schools and colleges has been significantly cut in real terms. Per-pupil funding had fallen by approximately 11% for colleges and 23% for school sixth form by 2024-25, compared with 2010-11 levels. That decline is the largest in any part of the education sector from nought to 19, and it has not been fully addressed, even with recent increases in funding. That has left many schools and colleges working hard to deliver a broad and enriched education for their 16 to 19-year-old students in the context of severe resource limitations. There is no doubt that the international baccalaureate is a welcome development in 16-to-19 education. Its programme of study allows students to maintain a broader base, studying six subjects compared with the three of four that are typical for students taking A-levels. The IB also has a focus on broader skills and on creativity, as well as a more diverse range of assessment methods. It has many features that should be common to all post-16 education. But the IB is taught in just 20 of the 2,132 schools and colleges in the state sector that offer 16-to-19 education—less than 1% of those institutions—and in less than 10% of independent schools. The Government’s decision to redeploy funding from the large programme uplift for the IB must be seen in the context of the broader challenges they face. Given the education funding landscape they inherited, how can they deliver an excellent education for every 16 to 19-year-old student across academic, vocational and technical pathways?

• 29 Oct 2025 · International Baccalaureate: Funding in State Schools · Hansard source

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  I am not going to take any further interventions. The international baccalaureate is an important part of the landscape, and I am pleased that the Government have confirmed that all schools can continue to offer it if they wish, but the bigger challenge for the Government is to ensure that there is excellence and enrichment across the board for post-16 education, which is a challenged part of our education landscape. Every young person should be able to benefit from an engaging, inspiring and exciting course of study, whether they are on an academic, vocational or technical route and wherever they live in the country, and every school and college should have the resources it needs to deliver.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Holidays During School Term Time · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I start by recognising the strength of feeling on term-time absences from school, particularly among the almost 182,000 people who signed the petition. Family life is precious, and there are so many pressures bearing down on families that serve to make time spent together relaxing and enjoying one another’s company all the more important. Going away on holiday; major family celebrations; religious holidays not currently reflected in our school calendar; caring responsibilities; parental separation—a whole range of circumstances can seem like more important priorities than being in school every single day of the school year, but I will set out three reasons why I do not agree that 10 days of permitted absence a year is the right way to address these concerns. First, and most importantly, all the evidence indicates that it is in children’s best interests to be in school with their peers as much as they possibly can. The link between attendance at school and attainment is strong: the Government’s data shows that key stage 2 pupils in year 6 who attended almost every day were 1.3 times more likely to achieve the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, compared with pupils who attended 90% to 95% of the time. Missing 10 days of school a year reduced the likelihood of achieving the expected standard by 25%. For key stage 4 pupils in year 11, the situation is even starker. Missing 10 days of school reduces the chance of gaining a grade 5 in English or maths by 50%. That is because education builds from the foundations of a subject upwards. Missing days of education results in gaps in knowledge and understanding, which can affect a child’s ability to grasp future concepts properly, meaning that they never fully catch up. Secondly, a major concern of many petitioners is the excessive cost of holidays outside term time. Holidays are really important, and families should be able to go away. It is absolutely wrong for travel companies to exploit the constraints of families with children of school age by hiking up their prices during the school holidays. The practice is simply unfair—but the solution to the unfair pricing policies of travel companies is not to allow parents to remove their children from school to be able to afford a holiday; it is for travel companies to do the right thing and even out their pricing over the year, so that parents of school-age children are not penalised for doing the right thing and keeping their children in school. Thirdly, I am concerned about the impact of a change in policy to allow authorised absence for some parents on the attendance of the most vulnerable pupils. We have an attendance crisis in our schools at present; more than 22% of children severely or persistently absent from school. My Committee has been doing some work on school attendance, and we know that persistent and severe absence is a complex problem with a number of contributory factors, including poverty, an increased level of social, emotional and mental health need following the covid-19 pandemic, and the crisis in the SEND system. School leaders tell us that the pandemic broke the social contract between schools and parents, and that it has often been difficult to repair it. Introducing an entitlement to authorised absence would send entirely the wrong message to families at a time when the whole system should be pulling together to restore trust and confidence and to support children who are struggling to be in school to thrive. For the most vulnerable children, school is a protective factor. It is where they can get a hot meal—thanks to this Government, they are able to get both a healthy and nutritious breakfast and a hot lunch—can forge positive relationships with trusted adults and can access not only education, but a wider range of enriching extracurricular activities. If we say it is fine for the children of parents who can afford a holiday to skip school for 10 days, what message are we sending about the importance of being in school to the families who may never have the opportunity to go on holiday, but who often encounter significant obstacles in getting their children to school, for a wide range of reasons? The current challenges of severe and persistent absence demand multiple solutions. Schools must continue to rebuild relationships of trust with parents. The Government’s reforms to SEND and to the curriculum and assessment framework must ensure that school is an exciting, inspiring and engaging place for all children and young people. The child poverty strategy must remove the barriers to school attendance for the poorest pupils.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Holidays During School Term Time · Hansard source

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  Fundamentally, we are talking about relationships in this debate, particularly between schools and parents. The best way to build strong relationships is not through punitive measures. We need to properly resource schools, through the wider policy work of Government, to rebuild the relationships that were so damaged by the pandemic, and to make progress in this area. Finally, I come back to where I started. Family time matters, and family holidays are important periods of fun and restoration. I call on the Government to do more—to work with the travel industry to stop the exploitation of families with school-age children through unfair price hikes, perhaps by introducing a new family-friendly charter mark for companies that even out their pricing throughout the year—and to continue to ease the cost of living pressures that far too many families face, so that every child can thrive both in school and at play.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Holidays During School Term Time · Hansard source

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  I have not mentioned fines, but I agree that fining parents is a very flawed area of policy. I do not want to say it is always entirely the wrong thing to do, but fines are not a particularly effective mechanism for discouraging parents from removing their children from school for a holiday. The cost of a fine is almost always cheaper than the additional costs of a holiday outside term time. That is why I said that the solution to the imbalance in costs across term time is not to enable and authorise that absence, but to deal with the exploitative policies of travel companies. Fines, undoubtedly, are an imperfect mechanism.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Post-16 Education: Skills Needed in the Economy · Hansard source

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  My Committee’s recent report on further education and skills highlights the poor amount of information on vocational and technical training opportunities, including apprenticeships, available to young people while they are in school. We recommend that UCAS be expanded to provide a single portal for information on academic, vocational and technical opportunities, so that every young person is aware of how they can train in the skills that they need to access a good job. Will the Secretary of State consider this recommendation, and work with the Department for Education to deliver it?

• 27 Oct 2025 · Post-16 Education: Skills Needed in the Economy · Hansard source

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  6. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help ensure that post-16 education provides the necessary skills to support the economy.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Post-16 Education and Skills Strategy · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. I welcome the Government’s focus on further education and skills, which have been overlooked for far too long and are critical to the delivery of the Government’s missions. My Committee has recently undertaken an inquiry into FE and skills, and I am pleased to see a number of our recommendations reflected in the statement, particularly in the commitment to address the vortex of failure in which the current system of English and maths resits traps far too many young people. I welcome the priority of increasing the quality of further education, but there are two key contributors to quality that the Secretary of State did not mention in her statement. The first is the 15% pay gap between teachers in schools and teachers in FE colleges, which is a barrier to recruitment and retention for colleges. The second is the inability of FE colleges to reclaim VAT, a situation for which my Committee found no justification and which City College Norwich told us made the difference of a whole floor to a new building that it had recently completed. How does the Secretary of State plan to ensure that the further education sector has not only the policy framework to improve quality but the necessary resources?

• 20 Oct 2025 · SEND Provision · Hansard source

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  My Committee’s recent inquiry on SEND found that, although support from health services is critical in enabling many children with special educational needs and disabilities to access education, health is often not represented at the table and there are no effective mechanisms to hold health services to account for the vital role that they play. What engagement does my hon. Friend the Minister have with her Department for Health and Social Care counterparts to ensure that health services play their full part in supporting and enabling children’s education?

• 15 Oct 2025 · Educational Assessment System Reform · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate and on his speech. Does he agree that it is an unacceptable feature of our education system that around a third of young people leave school without a recognised qualification, a grade 4 in English or maths? For many of those young people, the way that the system treats resits traps them in a cycle of demoralising continuous failure, just at the point when they should be discovering their passion—the thing they are good at—and should be preparing to get new qualifications and succeed in life? Does he agree that we need urgent work to stop that cycle of failure both upstream in schools and in post-16 education?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  As Chair of the Education Committee, I am pleased to present to the House our fifth report of this Parliament, “Solving the SEND Crisis”. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this statement. This inquiry was our first major undertaking in this Parliament. We chose the subject because the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities provision—SEND—is not just a challenge, but a moral imperative. Our report focuses on practical steps that can deliver an education system where every child, regardless of their needs, is given the opportunity to flourish. The crisis touches every corner of our education system, from early years to post-16 education. It affects 1.7 million children and young people, their families, their teachers and a wide range of other professionals. For too long, children and young people have been let down by a system that is fragmented, not fit for purpose and, as a consequence, often too adversarial. Our report sets out a road map for change—a vision for an inclusive, equitable and sustainable SEND system, grounded in the voices and experiences of the children and families it serves. Over eight months, we conducted a rigorous inquiry. I put on record my thanks to everyone who took part. We received over 890 written submissions and held seven oral evidence sessions. We heard from children and young people with SEND, whose courage and clarity moved us profoundly. We heard from parents exhausted by battles for basic rights, from teachers stretched beyond capacity and from professionals yearning to deliver but constrained by broken systems. We visited schools in Norfolk and learned from the inclusive model in Ontario, Canada, where children’s needs, not processes, drive support and where SEND provision is everyone’s responsibility. The evidence is stark. The number of children identified with SEND has risen by 400,000 in a decade to 1.7 million. Nearly half a million children have an education, health and care plan, and 1.2 million rely on SEND support. Behind those numbers lie stories of frustration, exclusion and unrealised potential. Parents told us about sleepless nights, navigating a maze of bureaucracy, and the impact on the whole family of having to fight constantly just for their child to be able to access education. Teachers spoke of the deep frustration they experience when they are unable to meet every child’s needs. Local authorities describe the invidious situation they face, holding the statutory responsibility for delivering for every child, but without the powers to do so, and with a funding crisis that is driving them to the edge of bankruptcy. This is not what inclusion looks like—this is a system at breaking point. Our report identifies a series of critical failures and offers practical, evidence-based solutions. First, inclusive education remains an aspiration, not a reality. A decade after the 2014 reforms, there is still no shared definition of what inclusion means. Without clarity, schools, local authorities and families are left adrift, with no consistent standard to aim for and no clear accountability for delivering it. We call on the Department for Education to publish a clear definition of inclusive education within three months, underpinned by national standards for SEND support and ordinarily available provision, backed by statutory duties and proper funding. Secondly, trust has collapsed. Parents and carers feel sidelined, blamed or forced into costly legal battles to secure their child’s rights. Last year, 95% of SEND tribunal appeals were upheld, a damning manifestation of systemic failure. We must rebuild trust through genuine partnership. This means treating parents and carers as equal partners in their child’s education, ensuring access to independent advocacy and making transparency the cornerstone of every process. Thirdly, while there are many committed, highly skilled professionals who work hard every day to deliver for children, there are some fundamental ways in which our workforce are not equipped to deliver. Teachers and support staff are dedicated but overstretched, lacking the training and resources to meet rising needs. Special educational needs co-ordinators are in short supply and are too often regarded as the sole person with responsibility for SEND support in a school. Educational psychologists are mired in assessments, preventing them from directly delivering interventions and sharing their expertise with other professionals. We propose a cross-departmental SEND workforce strategy, jointly led by the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care, to invest in training, to secure the recruitment of specialists and to free professionals to focus on frontline support. Fourthly, funding is broken. The notional £6,000 threshold for SEND support, unchanged since its introduction in 2014, is woefully inadequate. High-needs deficits are spiralling, and the statutory override is a temporary plaster on a deepening wound. We urge the Government to commission a full cost-benefit analysis of inclusive education and to ensure sufficient funding in the high-needs block to deliver early intervention, which can transform lives and reduce long-term costs. Finally, accountability is failing and there is a structural misalignment of statutory responsibilities and powers. We heard time and again that health and social care partners are too often absent from the SEND table and cannot be held to account. In education, accountability is unevenly distributed, leading to an understandable over-reliance on the statutory part of the system—the education, health and care plans—because it is accountable. We also heard that local authorities do not have the powers or the funding to deliver the school places that are needed, which is contributing to their financial pressures as they are forced to purchase expensive independent school places to meet their statutory responsibilities. We recommend statutory duties for health and social care, enforceable SEND tribunal powers for health provision and a SEND lead within the NHS to drive accountability, a statutory framework for SEND support and ordinarily available provision, and better alignment between local authorities’ responsibilities and their ability to deliver the school places that are needed to meet them. We have seen what is possible. At Aylsham high school in Norfolk, we witnessed a resource base seamlessly integrated into mainstream education where every child’s needs are met with flexibility and care. In Ontario, we saw a system where support is based on need, not diagnosis, and where parents are partners, not adversaries. These are not distant dreams; they are models that could be emulated across our country. I make it absolutely clear that the statutory entitlement to an education, health and care plan should remain unchanged. That is a commitment the Government must honour. During our inquiry, it became crystal clear to us that if we build a truly inclusive and properly resourced mainstream education system, we can ease the pressure and the struggle that so many families face in securing an EHCP, because in settings that have a whole-school approach to inclusivity, the needs of more children are met without having to go through that process. Inclusive education is not just a right; it is a necessity. It benefits every child, strengthens our schools and builds stronger communities. It is also cost-effective, reducing the long-term burden on public services by investing early in children’s potential. This report is not a catalogue of despair; it is a call for action. Our 95 recommendations offer a blueprint for reform, rooted in the lived experiences of children, families and professionals. We cannot afford another decade of delay, so I urge the Government to act with urgency and ambition, to work across Departments, to listen to those at the heart of this system, to rebuild trust and to place inclusion at the core of our education system. Every child deserves the chance to thrive. Every family deserves to be heard. Every education setting deserves the tools to succeed. Let us build a SEND system that delivers not just for today but for generations to come. Let us make inclusion a reality. I commend this report to the House.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right. As we made clear in our report, there are pockets of very good delivery—there are schools, local authorities and professionals across the system that are doing their best—but there is a postcode lottery in SEND, sometimes even within different schools that are very close to each other. We need a whole-system reset so that we can secure consistent delivery for all children, wherever they live.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his question. It was a real pleasure to meet some of his constituents who came to Parliament to participate in a workshop and to present their findings and their recommendations to me, which were then submitted as evidence to our inquiry. I hope that his constituents will see their experiences and their needs reflected in our report, and I agree with him that part of the key to solving this enormously challenging area of public policy is better engagement with parents, families and professionals across the country. That is how we understand where change needs to take place, and it is how we build trust for the future.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  I know that my hon. Friend has extensive experience of this area, not least through his own family experience. I am really pleased to see Ministers and the Secretary of State from the Department of Health and Social Care on the Front Bench for this statement—by accident, I think, but I will take full advantage of it. We heard time and time again from parents and from professionals working in the SEND system that health has such an important role to play in the ability of children with SEND to access education, but that health services are too often absent from the table and there are no mechanisms to hold them to account. It is nonsense that the SEND tribunal can make rulings that are binding on education, but cannot make rulings that are binding on health. As we propose in our report, that is an easy fix that would create more accountability in the health system. Our report contains other recommendations, but we need to get this right, because the consequence of not getting it right is children being locked out of education.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for his question, which is an important one. The evidence we saw in Ontario in Canada is that where parental involvement is embedded in the system, partly through statutory entitlements to participation in decisions about a child’s education, that builds much better partnership working, builds trust and confidence, and fosters collaborative relationships between parents and professionals. Those are the steps that we have seen in practice and believe can make a difference in the area that the right hon. Member raises.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Education Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her question and for her contribution to this report as a member of the Select Committee. The situation that we saw in Aylsham high was one where children’s needs were met across the whole school through a whole-school approach to inclusion. The headteacher of that school told us powerfully, “We are not a net generator of new EHCPs.” We are talking about what we have seen being delivered and what we therefore know is possible. A system that delivers whole-school approaches to inclusion can restore the EHCP to what it was originally intended to do under the Children and Families Act 2014—specifically to deliver support for the children with the highest levels of need. An inclusive approach to education can work for everyone.