Children’s Education Recovery and Childcare Costs

I must inform the House that the amendment has not been selected. I call the shadow Secretary of State for Education.

I beg to move,

That this House notes it is a year since the resignation of the Education Recovery Commissioner Sir Kevan Collins; condemns the Government’s continued failure in that time to deliver an ambitious plan for children’s recovery, including supporting their mental health and wellbeing; is concerned that the inadequate attention being paid to childcare, both for the youngest children and around the school day, is allowing the attainment gap to widen and costs to soar for parents at a time when there is significant pressure on household finances; and calls on the Government to match Labour’s ambitious plan for children’s recovery, including measures to keep childcare costs down for parents while the cost of living crisis continues.

Children’s voices are rarely heard in this place, but today I want to put them right at the centre of our discussions. With half-term over, I want to wish the very best of luck to all of the young people sitting exams this week and in the weeks to come. They deserve all of our good wishes, but they deserve far more than that. They deserve to be at the heart of how we think about our country and how we think about the Britain we want to build.

The last two and a half years have been an extraordinary time for all of us—for families, and for schools, colleges, nurseries and universities. I pay tribute to the staff right across the education sector, including teaching assistants, university lecturers, school caretakers, admin staff, childminders, catering staff, everyone who teaches in our schools and colleges, headteachers and nursery workers. So many people deserve recognition, and all parents know it, so I place on record again Labour’s thanks to them for all that they have done.

It has also been an extraordinary and challenging time for our children. After all, they only get one childhood, and although experts have lined up to tell the Conservative party how much it matters to put in place a recovery plan for their education and wellbeing—not just for their learning now, but for their futures—still this Government are failing them. That failure and neglect are even clearer today when the Education Secretary cannot even be bothered to turn up to debate the action we need to secure our children’s futures. He can spend endless hours touring broadcast studios, praising his lawbreaking boss, who has lost the trust of the British people and his own Back Benchers, but he cannot find time to be here with us today to debate how our children recover from the greatest disruption to their learning and lives in peacetime.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the lack of funding for education under this Conservative Government started long before covid came along? Funding in my schools on average is down by 6.3% since 2014-15. Does not that show that it is not just covid—this Government have consistently been cutting our children’s education?

My hon. Friend is completely right. We have seen year-on-year, real-terms funding cuts per pupil over the last 12 years. I find it incredible that Ministers expect some degree of gratitude for rolling back funding to 2010 levels by 2024-25—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) has something to say, I would welcome hearing it.

I’ll tell you later.

That is very generous of the hon. Gentleman—very generous indeed. I am sure we will all be waiting eagerly to hear his contribution.

Let us not forget how important education recovery should be to the Government, and how much it matters to children, to families and to their futures, to our economy, to our country and to all our futures. Almost 2 million of our youngest children have never known a school year uninterrupted by covid. Students sitting their GCSEs this summer lost around one in four days of face-to-face teaching in year 10. Parents, headteachers and nursery managers who I met across the country told me about delays to children’s speech and language development, about how children struggle to use a knife and fork, about a loss of confidence in our young people, and about their frustrations at being unable to get children the help and support they so desperately need. They have also warned, as has Ofsted, about the explosion in mental health conditions among our young people. At national level, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has been clear that failing to support our children’s recovery now will cost the economy an estimated £300 billion. What bar for evidence do those warnings not meet? Who else needs to tell the Government about the crisis our children face before they finally cotton on? What more reasons do Ministers need to act to protect our children’s futures?

The Government have failed our children. We see in the behaviour of Ministers a heady blend of three distinct approaches to the responsibility of Government. Sometimes they do nothing, or sometimes they do not turn up. Sometimes they actively make things worse and sometimes they belatedly accept that the Opposition are right, but not before families and children have paid the price for their pride. The first two sadly dominate their approach to our children. It has been a pattern throughout recent years. Time and again they have treated our children as an afterthought. We saw that when the support that children needed to learn at home was delayed, and when exams were thrown into chaos for not one year, but two. We saw it over 18 long months of inaction on school ventilation. We saw it when Government Members voted to let our children go hungry during the holidays and—perhaps most powerfully—we saw it when pubs were reopened before our schools.

I remind the House that, if we had followed the Leader of the Opposition’s advice, children would have been out of school for even longer. The Government have put £5 billion into catch-up costs for teachers, schools and pupils. From the shadow Secretary of State’s magic money tree, how much is the Labour party committing, compared with that £5 billion, in its manifesto?

I must pick up the hon. Gentleman on his first point, which, I am afraid, is simply not right. It is just not accurate, but we know that the Government have a habit of this kind of thing. On children’s recovery, I suggest that he looks at the work that the Government commissioned by Sir Kevan Collins, who we can all, right across the House, recognise as an expert in this. The long-term damage to our economy and the costs that our country will face if we fail to get this right now is £300 billion—that is the hit. I assure him that everything that we have set out has been fully costed and I will happily send him a copy.

If my hon. Friend would like to find a way to find the £500 million needed on catch-up for children in our schools—not that she needs my suggestions—she could look at the Chancellor giving £800 to people who own two properties. If that was not happening, it would raise £660 million.

My hon. Friend raises an important point, not least because, throughout the pandemic, we saw vast quantities—billions of pounds—of Government waste, with personal protective equipment literally burnt because the Government had failed to deliver what was necessary. Money was lost to fraud and money was lost in waste. We take our responsibilities on public spending incredibly seriously.

Perhaps another pot of money for the Government to look at is how every pound spent in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on tax fraud delivers £16 back. If the Government were really serious about raising some extra money for important issues such as our children, perhaps they could look at tax fraud, which they seem to be quite ignorant of at the moment.

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that, as with all these things, it is a question of political priorities. A Labour Government would have prioritised our children’s recovery from the pandemic. They would have been at the heart of what we needed to see as we started to rebuild our country. That is what we would have delivered from government.

I will take the hon. Lady back to the closure of schools during lockdown. We now know that that had a profound impact on many children, for a host of reasons. I know that the Secretary of State has said that, in hindsight, the way it was done was perhaps not the right thing to do. First, does she agree with that? Secondly, does she agree that schools should become part of our essential national infrastructure so that we do not close them again should an unfortunate pandemic happen again?

I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Gentleman and I appreciate the expertise that he brings to these issues. He raises an important point about how we plan for the future and look at what worked during the pandemic and what needs to be done differently. I am glad that the inquiry into our covid response will now consider issues around children and schools. That is right and important.

I have a significant degree of sympathy for the very difficult decisions that Ministers faced right at the start of the pandemic when confronted with an unknown virus. We can all remember how terrifying that was; I think it was the right decision when Ministers acted in the way they did. What I find inexcusable, however, is that, from that point, there was no proper plan to get our children back to school as quickly as possible—to use all available methods to do that as safely as possible. I find it incomprehensible that we still do not have a proper plan, but I recognise the hon. Gentleman’s point about the need to ensure that, in the event that we see such a terrible situation again, our children are put first. I am afraid to say that they were not during this pandemic.

We see this as schools face eyewatering costs for their energy. A primary school on Merseyside recently contacted me with its electricity bills from April last year and April this year. For April 2021, its electricity bill was £1,514. For April 2022, its electricity bill was £8,145—a rise of more than 400%. Where are the Government, as those costs soar and our schools need help to protect children’s learning from rising crisis, to ensure that energy bills are not being paid by cutting back on staff, activities and summer trips, and the quality of children’s school lunches? Nowhere. Again and again, we see a Government not leading the way but leaving schools to work out 100 different solutions on their own.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. She mentioned school meals. Does she agree that it is a disgrace that only 4p—four pennies—has been spent in terms of an increase on school meals per portion since 2014?

My hon. Friend raises an important point. It is incredibly important that all our children receive healthy nutritious meals while at school, but also through the holidays. We know so many families are under significant pressure at the moment.

The Government are not just failing our children at school. They are failing our families, not merely through months of inaction but through conscious choices, time and again, to make life harder still for working people. It took five months for the Chancellor to come to this House and set out the windfall tax for which Labour had been calling all that time—five months when families were forking out £53 million a day. Let us not forget that the wider cost of living crisis we face today is a crisis made worse in Downing Street: income tax thresholds frozen, council tax up, national insurance up, petrol costs through the roof, food prices soaring and universal credit support slashed. Again and again, when the Chancellor wants to raise money, he has reached for the pockets of working people.

I have been hoping that the Chancellor’s change of heart on the windfall tax might be an omen that the Education Secretary and his Minister might start to heed some of our calls. I cannot but welcome, for example, the Government’s belated conversion to the belief that headteachers in our schools, rather than executives and overseas HR firms, are best placed to ensure children get the tutoring they need. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made that point last summer, when she raised our concerns that the national tutoring programme was being taken out of the hands of education experts and given to a multinational HR company. She asked the Secretary of State and his predecessor whether they were happy with the contract and could provide assurances that it was not a cost-cutting exercise to the detriment of our children’s learning. Those assurances could not be given and the contract has failed. At the current rate of progress, all secondary school pupils will have left school by the time his Government deliver the 100 million tutoring hours promised.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the best way to tackle inequalities is to invest in early years? I have first-hand experience of how Sure Start centres made a significant impact on families and children, particularly in marginalised and disadvantaged areas. Does she agree that the Government need to do much more to invest in early years on the scale that Labour invested?

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The last Labour Government transformed early years—we put it first and made it an absolute priority—and I assure her that the next Labour Government will do the same again. Early years childcare and education in this country is too often unaffordable, unavailable and inaccessible.