Helen Hayes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. The education and children’s social care system across the country has been well represented, and we have heard contributions about the challenges in SEND, further education, schools, rural areas and early years. Right hon. and hon. Members have welcomed the expansion of free school meals and the introduction of free breakfast clubs. I thank the Minister for her response, and join her in paying tribute to all the professionals who work so hard every single day to improve the lives of children and young people across the country. I urge her to work very closely with parents as she brings forward SEND reforms, because at the heart of successful reform of the SEND system is the rebuilding of parents’ trust and confidence. The Education Committee will be robust in its continued scrutiny of the Government. I say gently to the Conservatives that the problems that they are attacking the Government for not solving within a year are the legacy of their 14 years in power. We are talking about trust and confidence in the SEND system; we would build trust and confidence in this place if there was slightly more honest reflection, humility and thoughtfulness on that point. I again thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate, and I look forward to further scrutinising the work of the Government. Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54 (2) ).

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an important point about the state of the school estate. The final area of challenge is that many universities face a risk of insolvency. At the heart of all the Department’s responsibilities are individual children and young people who need and are entitled to the best possible start in life, secure foundations, a great education and every opportunity to grow into active citizens with successful careers and a good quality of life. The challenges in our education and social care systems can be seen in the outcomes for children and young people, with rising numbers of children not meeting the early learning goals when they start school, growing disadvantage gaps at all stages of education, very poor outcomes for care-experienced young people, rising levels of school absence and far too many children with special educational needs and disabilities not receiving the support that they need to thrive in education. I will speak to the estimates across five key spending areas—SEND, children’s social care, early years, skills, and higher education—drawing on the Education Committee’s ongoing inquiries to ensure that these funds meet the urgent needs of our communities. On special educational needs and disabilities, the main estimate reflects the Government’s recognition of the challenges, with an immediate increase in high needs revenue funding of more than £1 billion. Capital spending for high needs provision sees a 138% uplift, from £310 million to £740 million, to create new school places. During the inquiry, my Committee has heard powerful testimony from families and educators about the crisis in the SEND system, with witnesses calling for significant and far-reaching reform to ensure that funds translate into effective delivery for children. The Institute for Fiscal Studies warns that rising SEND costs could absorb much of the mainstream school budget uplift, and that capital investment, while significant, may not meet growing demand. The forthcoming schools White Paper promised this autumn must set out bold reforms, with resources made available to ensure that they can be implemented successfully. Our inquiry report will set out recommendations to the Government for reform of the SEND system, and I hope that the Government will make time to take full account of our work. I urge the Minister to confirm a timescale for those reforms, informed by our Committee’s evidence. Our children’s social care inquiry has exposed acute funding pressures, with local authorities forced to prioritise crisis interventions over preventive support due to a £1.2 billion cut in early intervention spending since 2012. The spending review introduces a £555 million transformation fund over three years, including £75 million in 2025-26 and £270 million for a new children’s social care prevention grant. That is a vital step towards effective reform. The additional £560 million for children’s homes and foster care placements is also welcome. However, the independent review of children’s social care estimated a need for an additional £2.6 billion of funding over four years. My Committee’s work underscores the urgency of investing in early intervention to reduce the number of children being taken into care and to improve outcomes.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  I rise to address the House on the Department for Education’s main estimate for 2025-26. I thank the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this debate this afternoon; it is an important opportunity to scrutinise the Government’s spending plans, which must deliver for every child, young person and family. Education is the bedrock of opportunity, social mobility and economic growth. The Government inherited a situation in which almost every aspect of the Department for Education’s areas of responsibility faced severe challenges, from the financial pressures on early years providers to the erosion of school budgets and teacher pay, the crisis in the special educational needs and disabilities system, underfunding of further education and skills and a total reset needed in children’s social care.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her important work in this area. I agree that the cuts made to the adoption and special guardianship support fund have caused great alarm across the adoption, special guardianship and kinship care community. It is important that in reviewing that funding, the Government look at how effective support for adoptive families can be provided across both health and education, and look to give families confidence that the support they rely on and that is needed can be delivered. We know that in the past, adoptive families have not always been able to access the support they need, so I agree with my hon. Friend that this is an urgent and important consideration. I call on the Government today to provide a clearer analysis of the funding that is needed for children’s social care, as well as plans to bridge the gap between the funding that has been announced to date and the £2.6 billion prescribed by the independent review, so that preventive services that keep families together can be prioritised. Turning to early years education, the expansion to 30 hours of funded childcare for under-fives from September 2025 is transformative. The main estimate allocates £8.48 billion to the early years block—nearly double the 2023-24 spend—with an additional £1.8 billion in 2025-26. However, the IFS highlights that higher than expected take-up could increase costs by £1 billion annually, and the sector faces a shortfall of 70,000 places and 35,000 staff. The £370 million for 3,000 new nurseries in primary schools is a very positive step, but the Committee has heard concerns about delivery timelines and workforce shortages. Given the rising costs to providers, including minimum wage and national insurance increases, I urge the Minister to clarify how the Department will ensure sufficient capacity and support providers to deliver this ambitious expansion on time. It is also important that the Government give careful consideration to improving quality and consistency in the early years, and to how best to ensure that high-quality early years education maximises the unique opportunity in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life to stop the impacts of disadvantage being embedded for a lifetime. On skills and further education, the 12.7% increase in the apprenticeships budget to just over £3 billion, alongside £1.2 billion annually by 2028-29 and £625 million for construction skills, signals the Government’s commitment to equipping young people for a changing economy. In our inquiry, however, my Committee heard concerns about the defunding of level 7 apprenticeships, with witnesses including the British Chambers of Commerce warning that it could limit higher-level opportunities and deter participation. The absence of detail on the lifelong learning entitlement in the spending review is also of concern. The forthcoming post-16 skills and education White Paper must provide a unified and comprehensive vision for skills funding for young people and adults. I urge the Government to reconsider their decision on level 7 and to set out how additional funding will be allocated to maximise impact. Finally, higher education faces significant challenges, with a 13% real-terms cut to direct teaching funding via the strategic priorities grant, which is now more than 80% lower than 2010-11 levels. My Committee has heard evidence of universities closing courses, reducing repairs and maintenance, and facing financial instability. The Office for Students’ 2025 report warns of declining performance, with recovery reliant on optimistic recruitment forecasts. While the modern industrial strategy promises better targeted funding, our universities—which are anchor institutions supporting thousands of jobs in every town and city that has a university—need urgent support. I therefore repeat the sector’s call for a transformation fund to stabilise universities and enable them to deliver the reforms that are necessary to ensure that they meet future skills needs and continue to contribute to economic growth through research and development and the role they play in building international collaboration. The Education Committee will continue to scrutinise the work of the Department for Education carefully and hold the Government to account, ensuring that these funds deliver for every child and every learner. I urge Ministers to act swiftly on the promised White Papers, engage with our inquiries, and translate investment into meaningful change. Education is our most powerful lever to bring about a fairer, stronger country; let us ensure that it delivers.

• 16 Jun 2025 · SEND Support: Children without an EHCP · Hansard source

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  One of the biggest challenges affecting the delivery of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities is the extent of local authority funding deficits. They are currently dealt with through the statutory override, which allows local authorities to set a balanced budget without accounting for their SEND deficits. Given that the statutory override expires in March 2026, does the Secretary of State agree that a White Paper in autumn 2025 provides far too little time for the Government to implement meaningful change without extending the override further, and when does she expect local authorities to be able to have the certainty that they need to plan for the coming financial year?

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  Of course, in our two boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark, the contribution of the Windrush generation is extraordinary. It is demonstrated most powerfully in the statue that my hon. Friend mentions. The lives of Windrush passengers, and of others from the Caribbean who followed them to Brixton, were captured by commercial photographer Harry Jacobs, who set up shop on Landor Road, close to Brixton town centre, to provide photographic services so that people could send images to their loved ones. Harry’s photos poignantly captured the hopes, dreams and achievements of people in the process of making a new life: a woman in her nurse’s uniform; families dressed in their Sunday best, showing off their prized possessions; and the first image of a new baby or a new spouse. However, as we remember those stories with affection, our commemorations of Windrush Day must avoid any sentimentality. The contribution of the Windrush pioneers was made in a context of widespread racism, the clearest and ugliest illustration of which was found on signs on the doors of boarding houses—stating “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs”—and which in many situations ran much deeper, often resulting in daily discrimination and humiliation. An egregious example is the appalling and still unaddressed scandal of black children being deemed emotionally subnormal in the 1960s and ’70s and being placed in special schools, where they were denied an education and made to feel inferior.

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. This is a question of trust and a question of basic fairness. There cannot be any excuse for a lack of clarity across compensation schemes dealing with similar structural injustices for which the state is responsible. There is more work to do to ensure that such a scandal can never happen again. This means reflecting on the causes of the Windrush scandal in future policy and legislative decisions. For example, we must make sure that the introduction of e-visas allows no scope for anyone who is legitimately in the UK to be wrongly denied their status because they cannot access a document online. It also means ensuring that we understand our own past. The Government have commissioned Professor Becky Francis to undertake the curriculum and assessment review, and I hope she will be thinking about how subjects such as history and geography can be taught through the prism of an accurate understanding of our past, so that through a prism of migration to our country, whether, like me, people come from a town with a Viking name and a Norman church or whether their family arrived in the UK in more recent times, they can locate their own story in our history and understand that there is no us and them. We are a nation that has always been formed and sustained by people who have come from overseas to make their home on these islands. And it means resourcing properly the organisations that are the custodians of history, including the National Windrush Museum, and the Black Cultural Archives in my constituency. The BCA was established in 1981 by Len Garrison, who had come to the UK from Jamaica as a child in 1954 and became a great educationalist in our city. The BCA has an extensive archive documenting the history of black people in the UK, from the African-Roman emperor stationed at Hadrian’s wall, Septimius Severus, to black Georgians, the Windrush generation and much, much more. It is a national resource that is critical to our understanding as a society and vital for the sense of place and belonging for many black British people. The BCA needs stable core funding from the Government commensurate with its national role to enable it to do the work of outreach and interpretation, and to secure it for the long term. I mention very briefly the important and ambitious campaign led by Patrick Vernon to retrieve the anchor of the Empire Windrush from its current resting place in the Mediterranean sea, so that it can be restored as a memorial and as a tool for the education of younger generations. In preparing for this debate, I have been in touch with many people who have campaigned and continue to campaign for Windrush justice. They have differing views about the role of celebration on Windrush Day. I know there are some who are concerned that celebration undermines the fight for justice and that they cannot celebrate until justice has been done, and I understand that perspective, but there are others who passionately believe that assertively celebrating the Windrush generation and all they have contributed and achieved, giving visibility to the community, is a part of the fight for justice. That celebration sustains their campaigning and it is also important for health and wellbeing. I am looking forward to joining the Brixton Immortals Domino club celebrations on Saturday and the Big Caribbean Lunch on Sunday, organised by Ros Griffiths, both to be held on Windrush Square in my constituency. Finally, I want to consider the wider importance of fully addressing the Windrush scandal and all its implications. As my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) highlighted, the Windrush scandal happened as a consequence of structural injustices and it happened as a consequence of our history. Windrush must not be compartmentalised, because if we do that we cannot be sure that such a scandal will not be repeated. I mentioned the extraordinary role of members of the Windrush generation and their descendants in our NHS, which continues to this day. Our NHS today, in King’s College hospital in my constituency, is also sustained by nurses from the Philippines and south India, who were asked to come by our hospitals because we needed their skills in our healthcare system. We cannot rest until we are sure that they, or any other group, will not face the horrific injustice of discrimination based on racism and ignorance that is embedded in law and policy. I welcome very much the personal commitment of my hon. Friend the Minister to Windrush justice. I was pleased to attend the Windrush summit last week at the Home Office. It is a credit to the approach my hon. Friend has taken and the work she has done that so many people who have campaigned for Windrush justice felt able to attend an event in the Department that had done them such wrong. I know that many of the attendees would not have thought that possible just a few months ago. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to implementing all the recommendations of Wendy Williams’ lessons learned review and the imminent appointment of a Windrush commissioner. I thank her for all the work she is doing to listen, engage and take meaningful steps to restore trust and confidence. I know that she understands that there is much more still to do, and I look forward to continuing to work with her on behalf of my constituents to secure the depth and breadth of the change we need.

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  I will come on to the wider implications of the scandal, which I think speak to the issue my hon. Friend highlights. The Windrush scandal was the most egregious breach of trust. The Windrush compensation scheme was poorly set up by the previous Government, justice has been far too slow and, sadly, many victims of the scandal have died still waiting for redress. It was very moving to attend, with my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), the Windrush national vigil on Windrush Square on 6 April, led by Bishop Dr Desmond Jaddoo, to remember the victims. A comparative analysis by King’s College London of the compensation scheme compared with other redress schemes, including the Post Office Horizon scheme and the infected blood scandal scheme, has demonstrated that the Windrush compensation scheme has a much lower success rate for applicants, more complex initial eligibility requirements, a higher required standard of proof, an inaccessible application process, an absence of funding for independent legal representation for applicants, decision making that lacks independence, and a process that is inaccessible. It is vital that changes are made so that victims of the Windrush scandal can have confidence in the compensation scheme. That is important because the impacts of the scandal are experienced not only by the victims themselves, but across the Windrush generation as a whole and for subsequent generations, who live with the emotional weight and the economic cost of what their loved ones have endured, and whose trust in British institutions and the Government has been fractured as a consequence.

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered Windrush Day 2025. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate. On 22 June 1948, HMT Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury docks from the Caribbean, carrying 1,027 passengers and two stowaways. More than half the passengers came from Jamaica, and there were many from Trinidad, Bermuda and British Guiana. There were other nationalities too, including Polish passengers who had been displaced during the second world war. The passengers were responding to advertisements in local newspapers, including The Gleaner in Jamaica, for jobs in the UK, with an opportunity to travel on the Windrush for £28. As we mark this 77th anniversary, I want to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Windrush pioneers who have passed away in the last year. They include Windrush passengers Alford Gardner, who I had the privilege of meeting at the 70th anniversary reception in Speaker’s House, and “Big John” Richards. They also include the Windrush pioneers Nadia Cattouse, Eddie Grizzle, Enid Jackson, Claudette Williams, Gerlin Bean, Lord Herman Ouseley—the former chief executive of Lambeth council—Paul Stephenson, Norman Mitchell, Nellie Louise Brown and my constituent Neil Flanigan, a founding member of the West Indian Association of Service Personnel. Their loss is an important reminder of the importance of capturing the stories and oral histories that are part of our national story while there is still time to do so. In 1948, the UK was desperate for labour to help rebuild the country following the devastation of the second world war, and the passengers on the Windrush brought a wealth of skills. They included dozens of airmen who had volunteered to serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and who had played a hugely significant role in fighting fascism in Europe, including the late Samuel Beaver King—Sam King—who became the first black mayor of Southwark. Windrush passengers from the Caribbean travelled as British citizens as a result of the British Nationality Act 1948, which created a new category of “citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies” for anyone born or naturalised in either the UK or any of the countries subject to colonial rule. About 200 of the Windrush passengers found temporary accommodation at the Clapham South deep air raid shelter, from where they found their way to the nearest labour exchange, on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton in my constituency, to look for work and permanent accommodation. Many of them found accommodation through Jamaican landlord Gus Leslie, who had bought property in and around Somerleyton Road, and they settled in the area close to what is now called Windrush Square. The Windrush passengers found London still devastated by the war, and they found work in a wide variety of different sectors of the economy, including in construction and on London’s public transport network. It is fitting that one of the London overground lines has now been named the Windrush line. Of course, many of the passengers came to work in the NHS, which was formally established less than a fortnight after the arrival of the Windrush. King’s College hospital is at the other end of Coldharbour Lane from the site of the labour exchange in my constituency. Members of the Windrush generation have helped to sustain our NHS from its inception, not only in London but right across the country.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Spending Review 2025 · Hansard source

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  I welcome the focus my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has placed on children and young people in this spending review, with additional investment in children’s social care, schools and skills. These announcements show the Government’s commitment to improving the life chances of every child, and my Committee looks forward to scrutinising the detail in the coming weeks. The Chancellor will know that universities are the life force of many local economies, generating jobs, improving skills and boosting life chances, yet a number of our universities are at the brink of insolvency. The sector has been calling for a transformation fund to help universities reform and secure a sustainable future, so can the Chancellor confirm that she will work with Cabinet colleagues to ensure that no town or city has to face the calamity of a university going bust?

• 9 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T8. Across London, 90,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, denied the essentials of a stable home, which has terrible consequences for their physical and mental health and education. This is a scandalous inheritance from the previous Conservative Government. When does the Secretary of State believe that we will begin to see those numbers drop substantially?

• 9 Jun 2025 · Local Authority Funding · Hansard source

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  The statutory override to special educational needs and disabilities deficit comes to an end in just 10 months. Without a plan from the Government for the end of the statutory override, more than half of all local education authorities face effective bankruptcy. The need for a resolution to the issue is now long overdue. When does the Minister expect to be able to give local authorities the certainty they need?

• 5 Jun 2025 · Maths: Contribution to the UK · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this debate. It is heartening to hear about his love of maths as well as the enthusiasm of my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince). I have to confess that was not my experience of school. I was at a school which had a quirk: we had to sit maths GCSE twice—once in year 10 and in year 11. Although I can report to the House that I achieved a good grade in both exams, there was a clear narrative: that maths was a difficult subject, and definitely not for everyone. A lack of enthusiasm for the subject certainly pervaded among many of my peers and was allowed to go unchecked within the education system at large. I do not blame only my school for that; I think it was a common thing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow said, we need to challenge that. I have done the best to challenge it with my daughters, the youngest of whom sat her maths GCSE paper yesterday, so we will see whether I have been successful. We must have an approach that emphasises the critical importance of maths in our primary and secondary education systems and its foundational nature for so many aspects of education and life, and that also encourages a love of maths as part of a love of learning. Maths is key to problem solving and supports logistical reasoning and analytical thinking. It develops flexible thinking and creativity. Mathematical problems often require trying different approaches and tackling a question from multiple angles. Those skills equally apply in arts and the humanities subjects as they do in the maths and sciences. Maths is therefore foundational in building those essential critical skills. The practical applications of maths matter too. Financial literacy is important for us all. The Education Committee undertook an inquiry into financial literacy in May last year, in the previous Parliament, and recommended expanding financial education at primary level, the appointment of financial education co-ordinators in secondary schools and the provision of high-quality independently provided learning materials in all schools. Budgeting and saving, planning finances for the future, understanding how loans and interest work, and contributing to a pension pot are all skills that every young person should have when they leave school. Maths is a specialist subject, and we need skilled teachers to deliver interesting and inspiring lessons from reception all the way through to A-levels and on to higher education. There have been real challenges with the recruitment of new maths teachers for a number of years, with just under three quarters of the target of 3,000 teachers recruited for the current academic year. There are so many career opportunities open to graduates with degrees with a strong mathematical component, so it is important that the Department for Education offers strong incentives to train, recruit and retain maths teachers. I welcome the Government’s commitment to delivering an extra 6,500 teachers in England. It is critical that that target includes a good level of new maths teachers, appropriately supported to be recruited and retained within our education system. I turn briefly to the question of attainment in mathematics. Last year, 65% of pupils achieved a standard pass at grade 4 or above at GCSE in English and maths, but disadvantaged pupils were less likely to meet the expected standard—only 59% of them did so, compared with non-disadvantaged pupils. That means that 35% of young people are routinely not getting a qualification in maths while they are school. That should be a concern to us all. We want every young person to fulfil their potential in maths. Currently, those who do not achieve a grade 4 or above are expected to resit GCSE maths during their post-16 education. For some students, that means multiple resits of a subject that they have already found challenging for several years at school, and it traps them in a cycle of failure, just at the point where they should be discovering a love of learning and finding their vocation. The Education Committee has been looking at this policy as part of our inquiry on further education and skills, and asking whether that really is the best approach for all young people who do not achieve a grade 4 or above. For some students who achieve grade 3, the extra work in a new environment that is different from school may help them to successfully resit their maths GCSE, but for others repeated, unsuccessful resits can be demoralising and counterproductive. We have yet to report, so I cannot draw conclusions on behalf of the whole Committee, but we have received quite compelling evidence that embedding practical maths content into the curriculum for the particular subjects needed for the student’s chosen course of study may be a better way to support students on vocational pathways to achieve the level of both English and maths that they will need to apply later on in life, rather than the endless cycle of GCSE maths resits. Moving beyond GCSEs, it is good to see that maths is the most popular A-level subject, with more than 100,000 entries for A-level maths last year, as well more than 17,000 for further maths. But within those statistics, more work is needed to tackle the gender gap, because just 37% of last year’s maths A-levels were taken by young women, and a mere 27% of last year’s further maths A-levels. Increasing the number of girls taking maths will help to tackle the gender gap in science, engineering and maths at university and beyond. Having positive role models, and improving understanding of just how many well-paid and rewarding careers are out there, for which maths can help, are definitely two important approaches, but we need to do more. There should be more practical support available in our schools to overcome that gender gap in maths. Maths is an important component of many STEM degrees and myriad careers. To underpin a high-skill, high-wage economy, we need more young people with a good training in maths. I will end there, but I will just say that the Education Committee looks forward to scrutinising the curriculum and assessment review, and to scrutinising the Government’s recruitment of teachers, and we hope to see good progress in improving maths education and attainment for all pupils, across all our demographics, in every part of the country.

• 5 Jun 2025 · Free School Meals · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the expansion of the free school meals entitlement. It is an evidence-based approach for which many of us have campaigned for a long time. It will help to close the disadvantage gap in our schools, tackling child poverty, benefiting children’s health and supporting children to learn. I hope the Government will agree that every child who is eligible for this expanded entitlement should be able to receive that entitlement. Whether or not children get a free school meal to which they are entitled should not depend on somebody else making an application for them through a complicated process. The Government know which families are in receipt of universal credit, so is the Minister considering auto-enrolment for this expanded entitlement? That would be easier to achieve than auto-enrolment under the previous entitlement, and every child really should be able to benefit. Can I seek the Minister’s assurance that this very positive announcement is not an indication that other measures to reduce child poverty, such as scrapping the two-child cap, have been taken off the table? Finally, as a London MP and a former Southwark councillor who was very proud to be part of a council that introduced universal free school meals in 2010—we have seen the benefit of that policy, and I am proud we have a Mayor who is funding universal free school meals for all primary schoolchildren in London—can I ask for confirmation that London will also receive the funding for this expanded entitlement, so it can be put to the benefit of further reducing child poverty in London?

• 22 May 2025 · School Teachers’ Review Body: Recommendations · Hansard source

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  Teacher pay is absolutely vital for the status of the profession, for the quality of life of teachers and for recruitment and retention of the vital skilled and qualified staff who are the backbone of our education system. It is really important that the Government’s response this afternoon begins the work of restoring teacher pay after the last 14 years, when we saw, by any objective measure, a shocking erosion in teacher pay under the previous Government. That has affected recruitment and retention and had a devastating impact on teacher morale. Those on the Conservative Benches should take note of that, because we would all benefit from a little more humility in the context of the legacy that they left behind. Can I press the Minister on the extent to which the pay award will be funded? We know that there are already extensive pressures on school budgets, and schools are very anxious about that matter. Also, will this afternoon’s statement include support staff pay, and will it begin the process of restoring that pay? We know how vital our teaching assistants and other support staff in our schools are.

• 12 May 2025 · Immigration System · Hansard source

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  I represent a constituency that is enriched and sustained every day by people who have come from overseas to make their home here, especially those who came as members of the Windrush generation. It is important that they hear from this place that they are not only valued and appreciated but part of us. Last week, the Office for Students published another report on the precarious situation facing our universities. This announcement includes a levy on universities in relation to their international students. What engagement has the Home Secretary had with her counterpart at the Department for Education on the impact of her measures on the financial sustainability of universities?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Local Government Finances: London · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) on securing this important debate. I was a councillor in Southwark for six years before I was elected to this place. It is a privilege to serve in local government. Our councils carry the heavy responsibility of delivering local services across a huge range of areas, and they have a unique opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of local residents by delivering vital protections for vulnerable people as well as the services that all of us rely on. I pay particular tribute to my local councils, Lambeth and Southwark, for the work that they did during the covid-19 pandemic and what they have done over the last few years to support residents with the cost of living crisis. I was elected to my local council in 2010, on the same day that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government took power in Westminster. I remember the first meeting of our council, when we were briefed on its financial settlement from central Government at the start of a period of austerity. I remember the shock that descended in the room at the scale of the cuts to our budget as the impact on local services became clear. We had no idea what was yet to come. For 14 years, the Conservative Government outsourced both the pain and the blame for their austerity programme to our local councils, cutting well over 50% of the local government grant, slashing the affordable housing grant, freezing council rents, reducing investment in the existing council housing stock, and freezing the local housing allowance, driving up homelessness. On SEND—an area in which I take a particular interest as Chair of the Education Committee—the coalition placed almost all the statutory responsibility for delivering services on councils, but took away their ability to deliver new school places directly, driving up home-to-school transport costs and the cost of purchasing places in the independent sector. There will not be a Member here today who does not see the impact of the housing crisis, and the crisis of temporary accommodation, on our constituents and local authorities. The shortage of homes is driving more and more residents to seek support from their council, and putting more and more into the worst-quality accommodation, which has destabilising effects on families across our city. The Liz Truss mini-Budget had a devastating impact on our councils’ ability to build new homes. Both of my boroughs have ambitious programmes for delivering new homes, but they have had to mothball sites as the cost of materials and labour has been sent spiralling. On all of these issues and many more, London councils face a perfect storm in their finances, and we urgently need support from the Government. Let me finish with five quick measures that the Government should turn their attention to: raising the local council housing allowance to stabilise housing in London; ensuring immediate investment in small sites owned by councils and housing associations that already have planning consent and can be delivered; addressing the statutory override—there is not sufficient engagement with councils on what the Government plan as they begin to plan for the next financial year—getting housing revenue accounts back on a sustainable footing; and delivering multi-year settlements to give certainty and stability to our councils for the future. I know that our councils have the commitment and determination to keep delivering for our residents, and I call on the Government to support them to do so as a matter of urgency.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister has set out the Government’s commitment to increasing the take-up of free school meals for children who are already eligible, as well as a number of practical measures the Government are taking to make registration easier. On the basis of what she has said today, I am content not to push my new clause 1 to a vote. However, the Select Committee will continue to closely monitor the take-up of free schools meals. Should the progress that the Minister expects to see be lacking, we will come back and press the issue of auto-enrolment again with her and expect that she looks at it again.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in support of new clause 1, new clause 2 and amendment 2, all in my name. The amount of time afforded to the Education Select Committee to undertake detailed scrutiny of the Bill was very limited. We were able to undertake just one evidence session on part 2, and we deliberately sought not to duplicate the evidence taken by the Public Bill Committee. We therefore took limited evidence on the changes to the role of local authorities in school place planning and admissions. I speak, however, as an MP whose constituents have suffered the consequences of the fragmentation of admissions policies and place planning over the past 14 years. That has resulted in school places sometimes being delivered in areas where they were not needed, undermining other local schools; our councils struggling to ensure the delivery of school places that were needed, particularly for children with special educational needs and disabilities; and local places at a very popular local school being allocated not to local families but to children across a wide area of south-east London. I therefore wholeheartedly support the attempts in the Bill to restore coherence to admissions and place planning through the role of local authorities. I also support the measures to reduce the cost of school uniform for families by limiting the number of branded items, which are a really significant cost of living pressure for families. However, I encourage the Government to keep a careful watch on how this requirement is being complied with, particularly in relation to the cost of blazers, having heard of one appalling example in my constituency of a very vulnerable child who had been allocated a place at a good school but was told she could not attend until she was wearing a blazer, the cost of which was over £100—way beyond the means of her family. I know the Minister will agree that no child should be shut out of the classroom because their family cannot afford the right clothes for them to wear, and that that is the intention of the Bill, but the monitoring of the detail will be important. I also welcome the measures in the Bill to introduce a register of home-educated children. While home education is the right option for some children who are well supported to receive education at home, the number of children going missing from the education radar, out of sight and without any regulation of the quality of the education they are receiving, and sometimes coming to harm, as in the horrific recent case of Sara Sharif, is deeply concerning. The measures in the Bill will help to address this. The Education Committee welcomes the introduction of breakfast clubs in the Bill, which will help to ensure that no child has to start the school day hungry, but we also heard compelling evidence of the importance of school lunches for the poorest children. Around one in 10 children who are eligible for free school meals do not claim them because their parents or carers do not complete the administrative process. This can be because of difficulties with the administrative process itself, lack of awareness about the entitlement, or language barriers. Children from non-white backgrounds are more likely to be unregistered. This under-registration has impacts on schools too, since the ability of schools to draw down pupil premium funding is linked directly to the registration of eligible children for free school meals. I am talking about the existing entitlement, not a new spending commitment. The benefits of free school meals for children’s health and wellbeing and their ability to learn are clear, and are being seen in local authorities that are already auto-enrolling eligible children, including Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and some London boroughs. In London, the benefits are pupil premium receipts for schools because the Mayor of London is already funding universal free school meals. Research from the Food Foundation found that, while local authorities were successful in their mission to reduce the number of eligible children missing out on free school meals, it was a difficult and resource-intensive task, and the data sharing between relevant authorities necessary to register children automatically was not straightforward. The local authorities piloting auto-enrolment have called for central Government to step in and help. The Committee has recommended that the Government introduce auto-enrolment for children already eligible for free school meals. This recommendation would ensure that between 200,000 and 250,000 additional families with the poorest children in our country, who are already eligible, will receive the meals to which they are entitled. That recommendation is reflected in new clause 1, and I hope the Government will choose to support it today. I turn to amendment 2. The Committee took evidence on breakfast clubs. We heard about the benefits of them both in ensuring that children do not start the school day hungry, and in relation to the opportunity afforded a child to settle gently into the school day and play with their friends. We also heard about the need for breakfast to be provided on a flexible basis, so that children whose families are unable to get them to school early. who may be among the most vulnerable children, do not miss out on this vital meal. The Committee has heard extensive evidence in our inquiry on special educational needs and disability about the difficulties that families of disabled children have in finding childcare and accessing extracurricular activities. To that end, it is vital that children with SEND can access breakfast clubs on an equal footing with their peers. This may involve additional costs, particularly in relation to home-to-school transport and the need to have specialist staff on site at the time of the breakfast club. I welcome the fact that the early adopters programme includes about 50 specialist schools, but the inclusion of children with SEND in breakfast clubs in mainstream schools is also essential, and I hope the Government are looking closely at the early adopters and at any additional support that may be needed to ensure that. Amendment 2 would ensure that children with SEND were able to access breakfast clubs, and I hope the Government will support it. Finally, I turn to new clause 2. This is a very large Bill covering many areas of policy, and it is being taken through this House very quickly and was not subject to any pre-legislative scrutiny. There have been a large number of Government amendments at a late stage, and a number of measures in the Bill will be contingent on Government policies that are not in the Bill for their success, including the curriculum and assessment review, the reforms to the Ofsted assessment framework and the work of the child poverty taskforce. New clause 2 would require the Secretary of State to conduct regular reviews of the impact of this Act and to publish reports. I would anticipate that such reviews would show a positive impact of this legislation. Having a clear monitoring and reporting mechanism is good practice, particularly for a Bill of this size that has been delivered so quickly. I welcome the intention behind this Bill and the measures it contains. I look forward to supporting it this evening, and my Committee looks forward to playing a constructive role in scrutinising its impact in the months and years to come.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in support of new clauses 3 and 4, which both stand in my name. The Education Committee was afforded little time to undertake scrutiny of this important Bill, but we worked hard to do so, refocusing our ongoing inquiry on children’s social care to focus on part 1 of the Bill and holding an additional evidence session to look at part 2. I am grateful to all the witnesses who came to give us their evidence. We have published a report for the Secretary of State setting out recommendations based on the evidence we received. Broadly, the Committee welcomes the scale of the Government’s ambition as expressed in the Bill, which is a key plank of the Government’s opportunity mission to break the link between young people’s background and their future success. We join the Government in wanting to see high and rising standards in our education and care systems to protect vulnerable children and ensure educational opportunity for every child. We welcome the measures in the Bill to strengthen child protection, particularly the provisions to establish multi-agency child protection teams, including education in safeguarding arrangements and a single unique identifier for children, which has the potential to be genuinely transformative for the delivery of many of the services that support children and young people. We support the measures to improve the children’s social care market through regional commissioning and a financial oversight scheme. Action to remove profiteering in the children’s social care sector is long overdue. The Committee welcomes the measures in the Bill that will enable more children to remain within their kinship network or, where a residential placement in kinship care is not possible, in contact with family and friends. The Committee also made some recommendations on ways in which the Bill could be strengthened, based on the evidence we received. The amendments tabled in my name relate directly to our recommendations, and I will now turn to each recommendation that is relevant to part 1 of the Bill. New clause 3 would require the Government to publish and consult on a draft national offer for care leavers within 18 months of the Bill coming into force. A national care offer would set minimum standards for local care offers and ensure greater consistency between local authority areas. A national offer would act as a floor, not a ceiling. It would not be designed to prevent innovation at a local level or to stop additional commitments being made by individual local authorities, but we believe that greater national consistency, driven by Government, would make a big difference. The evidence of the unacceptably poor outcomes for care-experienced young people is shocking. Some 39% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 are not in education, employment or training, compared with 13% of all young people in the same age group. Some 14% of young people with care experience go to university, compared with almost half of their peers, and care leavers are 38% more likely to drop out of university. A third of care leavers become homeless within two years of leaving care, and 25% of homeless people have been in care. Care leavers are hugely over-represented in the criminal justice system. These are young people whose corporate parent has been the state, and these statistics are clear evidence that for many of them, the state is not a very good parent. I welcome the Government’s amendment of the Bill to introduce additional corporate parenting responsibilities, but the Committee heard that there is significant disparity in the support that different local authorities offer to care leavers. We heard about the differences in support with bursaries to pay for university accommodation, access to wi-fi to be able to study and ringfenced apprenticeships for care leavers in local authorities. In a powerful evidence session in which the Committee heard from young adults with recent experience of the care system, one witness told us that “there needs to be a national offer for care leavers. The postcode lottery is profound”. Another pointed to a lack of awareness of the needs of care-experienced people across the wider network of public services. She told us that “when I had gone to the jobcentres they were very ill-prepared. They did not know any support for care leavers. There were certain grants I could have had to get back into education; they did not inform me, in fact, everything that I have done now is from me Googling it…or asking people. That should not be the case.” A national care offer would be the foundation for building better, more consistent support for care leavers everywhere in the country. It would provide the Government with an effective mechanism for holding local authorities to account on the quality of their provision, making it much easier for care-experienced people to understand what support should be there for them and stopping the current disincentive to leave home to go to university because of uncertainty about the support when they get there. I urge the Government to support new clause 3. New clause 4 would require health assessments of children in the care system to include assessment by a mental health practitioner. It would make assessing the mental health of children in care a core part of the health assessment of those children by ensuring that a mental health practitioner is involved. Children in care are significantly more likely to have experienced trauma and abuse than their peers, and they are consequently more likely to experience mental ill health. In 2021, 45% of children in care had a mental health disorder—rising to 72% among those in residential care—compared with 10% of all children aged five to 15. The care-experienced young adults who gave powerful evidence to the Committee spoke strongly about the urgent need for better mental health support and suggested that local authorities are not always fulfilling their obligations to include emotional and mental health in their health assessments of children in care. One of our witnesses told us: “Growing up it was only physical assessments; we did not have mental health check-ins at all…I think if my mental health was taken more seriously from a young age, if I had that person to check-in with me…I would probably be so much better. I would not have mental health problems growing up. I do think that mental health check-ins are equally as important—if not more important—as physical check-ins for children in care.” Another witness said that “looked-after children should get mandatory assessments, as with physical health. Also, if they are referred to CAMHS the waitlists are horrific right now…looked-after children should have fast tracks and there should be more funding for specialist teams.” We heard very movingly from a witness who spoke about the need for more trauma-informed training for foster carers and other professionals working with children in care. She said: “I feel a lot could be explained if they understood the experience of trauma. It will take time. It will not go away at night, and sometimes before it gets better it could get worse. No one talks about that. You will not be okay if you are going into care; there is a reason why you are there, and so it is important that the minute you go into care every child should have a mandatory assessment, physical and mental, and there should be that on-call support for them”. It is the trauma that underlies the decision to take a child into care—the abuse, neglect, bereavement or exploitation—that often has the most profound impact on their lives. Our care system needs to place dealing with that trauma in a child-centred way at its heart. Ensuring that mental health assessments are properly undertaken is an essential requirement of such a system, because mental health must be assessed before treatment and support can be provided. New clause 4 would help to deliver that badly needed refocusing of the system, and I urge the Government to support it. I wish to make two further points. First, I support new clause 14, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). It would introduce a requirement to notify a child’s school and GP when they are placed in temporary accommodation. As a constituency MP in south-east London, I see the horrific impact of poor-quality, unstable temporary accommodation on children in my constituency every week. Temporary accommodation is harming children, whether through the sleep deprivation of having to get up at 4 am to travel a long distance to their school, the lack of space to do homework, the fear and insecurity of sharing a kitchen and bathroom with strangers, the physical health impacts of living with damp and mould, or the impacts on gross motor development of being in a space that is too small to crawl or play in. The impacts are profound, so it is completely right that there should be a statutory requirement to notify the public services that have the ability to help mitigate such impacts, and which have a responsibility for a child’s health and wellbeing when that child is placed in temporary accommodation. The Government should be taking urgent action to reduce the number of people in temporary accommodation, especially families with children. However, in the short term, the new duty introduced by my hon. Friend’s new clause would make a difference to the support those children receive. Finally, at the same time as we are debating this Bill, the Government are preparing to announce reforms to the welfare system. I wish to emphasise the vital importance of considering the impact on children of any proposed reforms. Children do not get to choose the families into which they are born, but each one is equally deserving of economic security and access to the resources they need to thrive. It is not a justifiable outcome of changes to the welfare system to make life harder for the poorest children, or to increase child poverty by limiting the access to support that their parents receive. The Government must undertake and publish an assessment of the impact of their welfare reforms on children, and must ensure that children do not suffer as a result of any planned reforms.

• 13 Mar 2025 · Mental Health Support: Educational Settings · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) on securing this important debate and on his excellent speech. The starting point for thinking about mental health services in educational settings must be an understanding of the foundational nature of good mental health and wellbeing in everything we seek to do in life. Challenges with mental health are corrosive in every aspect of our lives. Depression or anxiety can ruin the happiest of celebrations on the sunniest of days, prevent us from focusing on essential tasks, affect our relationships with friends, family members and colleagues and leave people feeling unable even to get out of bed in the morning. That is true for all of us as adults, and it is equally true for children and young people. Good mental health and wellbeing is essential for accessing and getting the most out of education, yet our children and young people are suffering an epidemic of poor mental health and wellbeing, and it is holding them back. On visits to schools in our constituencies, I am sure all Members will have heard headteachers, senior leaders and teachers in our classrooms talking about the challenges the young people in their classes face with their mental health. That is borne out by the data, too. In 2023, one in five children aged eight to 16 had a probable mental health disorder such as depression or anxiety, while the rates of probable mental health disorder among young people aged 17 to 19 have increased over just five years from a tenth in 2017 to more than a quarter by 2022. In this context, I welcome the Government’s commitment to place a mental health professional in every school across the country. However, I wish to raise some additional points that will be relevant to the effectiveness of that roll-out. The first is clarity on the level of qualification that the mental health professional in every school will be required to have, which I hope the Minister can provide. The second is on their remit: in addition to delivering services to young people, will they be expected to drive a culture across the whole school that is conducive to good mental health and wellbeing? That, as we all know, will involve the buy-in of the most senior school leaders. There are also other areas outside school that are relevant to children’s mental health and wellbeing, including the crisis in our special educational needs and disability system, which is having a profound impact on children’s mental health and wellbeing. My Committee heard this week from children who had been hospitalised and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence not of their additional needs, but of being in schools that are unable to meet their needs. I know that the Minister is aware of the urgent need to reform our SEND system. Mental health professionals in schools will also quickly be overwhelmed if we cannot get to grips with the crisis affecting our children and young people as a consequence of their addiction to smart phones and their access to social media, which we know is making them more anxious, less able to focus, more sleep deprived and more stressed out. I welcome the measures that the Minister announced in response to the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), but I do believe that there is a need to go further with this urgent crisis, which is affecting the mental health and wellbeing of our children. Finally, I wish to touch on the vital issue of CAMHS waiting times. We have GPs to prescribe antibiotics so that infections do not become sepsis, or blood pressure medication to prevent a heart attack or stroke, but when an infection has become a critical illness, or a patient has suffered a heart attack or stroke, we would not think for one second that it was appropriate to send them back to their GP. Yet that is exactly what happens to far too many children and young people who are seriously mentally unwell. It is an unacceptable situation and, as well as looking at mental health and wellbeing support in education settings, we also need to look at how our NHS can deliver much more quickly and effectively for children whose problems are much more serious than that.

• 13 Mar 2025 · Mental Health Support: Educational Settings · Hansard source

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  Among children and young people who suffer the most acute mental health challenges are looked-after children and young people, all of whom will have experienced some kind of adverse childhood experience or trauma resulting in their being taken into the care system. My Committee heard evidence a couple of weeks ago from children and young people who talked about the lack of adequate assessment of their mental health when they are taken into care and when they move placements. They called for a strengthening of the regulations around that so that their mental health and wellbeing are properly taken into account. I have tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which we will discuss early next week. Will the Minister give a commitment to look at that and see whether we can make the support better for children who are looked after?

• 10 Mar 2025 · Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding · Hansard source

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  The deep crisis in our SEND system, which is one of both funding and delivery, is letting down far too many children, and requires urgent action. Will the Minister update the House on the timing of the Government’s plans for SEND, and provide assurances that there will be full engagement with parents, professionals and young people with SEND on any such plans?

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me for a moment, I will come to some of the points that I think he wanted to emphasise. In the end, in both those cases—seatbelts and smoking—legislation had the effect of changing behaviour and changing societal norms, and in both cases, decades on from the introduction of legislation, it is hard to imagine that the regulation was ever controversial. Last year, the Select Committee recommended action across Departments to protect children from addiction, online harms and the mental health impacts of excessive use of smartphones. It supported a ban on mobile phones in schools and recommended a formal monitoring mechanism for a ban introduced through guidance, potentially leading to a ban in legislation. It recommended guidance for parents, whom it found to be lacking in confidence when it came to knowing exactly how to tackle this issue affecting children and young people, and recommended that the guidance should include—particularly for parents of babies and very young children—an emphasis on the importance of face-to-face interactions with their children, and guidance on the impact of screen use by parents while caring for very young children. That is an aspect that we do not debate enough in this place. The Select Committee supported an increase to 16 as the age of digital consent and recommended, among other developments, the promotion of a children’s class of phone that can be used for parental contact and for GPS locations, but not for internet access. I share the worry expressed by many Members that the Government are not acting with the urgency that is required in the face of the evidence they already have. The Bill will deliver, even in the form in which it has been presented today, some positive interventions that will make a difference, but I fear that the Government are doing too little too slowly. Parents want strong legislation, schools want strong legislation, and strong legislation will help to change societal norms in the way that is needed to protect children and young people and to stop the harms. The Education Committee will take a close interest in what happens from now on—the impact of the measures that the Government are introducing—but I urge the Government to get on quickly with the review and the guidance to which they will commit themselves today, and to go further and establish, with urgency and speed, a framework in law that can help parents, schools and professionals working with children to deal with a challenge that we all need to get to grips with.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  The Education Committee will certainly continue to take this issue extremely seriously and to monitor what happens, and I will say a little about that in a moment. We know that screen time is quite literally rewiring young brains, resulting in lower cognitive abilities and affecting language acquisition, critical thinking, social skills and attention span. When the Government have evidence of harm, they have a duty to act. The point of legislation in this case is its power to change societal norms in a way that will make a difference to parents and professionals who are currently struggling to limit the harms of screen time, but lack the back-up to do so. There are many comparable examples, with smoking and seatbelts being the most obvious, in which the evidence of harm became clear but the debate raged for many years, with counter-arguments against legislation.